That's not absolutely true. People lives have a value, around $10M for US transport. It means that if the cost of potentially saving one human life is more than $10M, it isn't worth it, as in, there are more important things to do with that money, including improving safety in other areas.
Now profits are important too. Companies need money. That's how they pay their employees, do R&D, stuff like that. If they don't make money, employees will get fired, and they won't be able to develop new, better and potentially safer planes. For airlines, they may be forced to make tickets more expensive or lower their standards to compensate for the costs of planes that don't fly. Talking about shareholders, you may be a shareholder too if your savings include Boeing stocks. Less profits has an avalanche of undesirable effects. Some of them affect the 1% but the majority of it make things slightly worse for the 99%.