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Except the stockholders never gain a conscience, and the CEO is beholden to them, so there's no incentive to stop behaving like a sociopath and stop exploiting employees. Time and again evidence has shown that rich companies are never satisfied with being rich; they always want more.

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Exactly, but only for publicly listed companies.

Private investors still want profit, but hopefully they'd be more interested (because of their larger stakes on average) in less rapacious approaches.

Although, now that I think about it, the key metric here is probably growth. As long as a company is growing, if growth >> margin to be reclaimed by being an ass, growth wins. But when growth =< that margin... there's always going to be pressure (aka Google).

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