>The plaintiffs suing Facebook's board include pension funds, like the Employee Retirement System for the city of Providence, Rhode Island, and individual investors
It may be "founder-friendly", but it's hurting thousands of Average Joes.
So it appears pretty clear that there's a bigger career game being played here, and it isn't even strictly about stock.
Apply your line of thought to democracy and you'll see what's the problem.
If you want an accurate government analogy, look at the military: it has to move fast to succeed. You only run a war by committee if you want to lose.
Go radically against these and chaos will erupt. It's both unintelligent and ideological to take speed as an absolute.
Actually no. As recently as Burwell v Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court said:
"Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not."
For example, if you're trying to maximize cash on hand in the very short term, you simply stop paying your bills and declare bankruptcy when creditors attack. But if your goals are further out, this becomes the exact wrong strategy. Whatever your goal may be, you need a time frame to determine what is and isn't a good use of resources in realizing it.
Conversely, anyone who says "maximize shareholder value" without specifying a time frame is either a fool or a grifter. You can imagine how well things go when these types get together and "agree" on something this dangerously unbounded as a fundamental operating principle.