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Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

Neither is true. Corporations are not fiduciaries for their shareholders and they do not have a fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder value or even to protect their shareholders' investments.

The board of a corporation is tasked with protecting the shareholders' investments by overseeing the selection of a CEO and corporate structural issues. And that's it.

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> The board of a corporation is tasked with protecting the shareholders' investments by overseeing the selection of a CEO and corporate structural issues. And that's it.

Right. So they have a duty to select a CEO who doesn't enable the unnecessary waste of corporate money on optional taxes.

No, that's exactly wrong. They don't have a duty to minimize waste, otherwise they would have a duty to not award golden parachutes or large executive compensation packages or even to pay themselves more than a few hundred bucks a year.

> otherwise they would have a duty to not award golden parachutes or large executive compensation packages

That's actually true though, they do have such a duty.

http://www.shareholderoppression.com/excessive-compensation

That only applies to approving their own excessive compensation..

It helps to read things before you link to then....

> So they have a duty to select a CEO who doesn't enable the unnecessary waste of corporate money on optional taxes.

Waste is one of a very short list of categories that are considered something no one wants: https://medium.com/bull-market/there-is-no-effective-fiducia...

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