If that were true then Amazon is doing terribly under Bezos.
Profits over time is an incomplete metric for measuring company success because CEOs can decide to invest it all back into capex.
This is not limited to physical assets, if you do R&D and produce a valuable drug patent then you don't need to pay taxes on that value yet, but actual value was created.
Stock is at best a proxy for what you actually care about.
* Profits = Revenue - Expenses
* Assets + Liabilities = Equity
New asset purchases are expenses and not profits. Equity (total market cap) is an estimate of the value of the company, including assets and outstanding liabilities.
This is also why asset depreciation is considered an expense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depreciation However, it may also be recorded as income with the initial purchase being considered an expense.
PS: There are an insane number of useful ways to run your personal books, and a few legally required methods in various situations. But, IMO your goal should be match the underlying economic situation of your enterprise not simply move numbers around based on an abstract formula.
Basically, companies are never actually identical so optimal moves for every company is going to be slightly different and this will compound over time. However, if each company is making the same moves then and getting the same results then none of them are making optimal choices.
Consider defense contractors may all be in the same market, but they have different contracts. Farms on the other hand are selling a commodity and are often mostly just at the whims of market forces.