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> The purpose of a corporation isn't to continue existing in perpetuity, but rather, to maximize returns for its investors.

Society grants a group of people immunity from personal liability when they form an organization that has some chance of carrying out some useful work. The organization becomes a special kind of entity - a corporation. It can operate without its investors & officers fearing that their own wealth is on the line should something go wrong. Societies do this because it is widely believed that it would be impossible for various things to happen without it. That is, if personal liability was always in play, nobody would organize human organizations to try to accomplish difficult/dangerous tasks, and the same might also apply to unlikely-to-succeed-but-potentially-significant efforts.

That's what the purpose of a corporation is, not maximising returns for its investors, which is a recent idea (dating back to the 1970s) and has nothing to do with why corporations exist.

True but offtopic or supportive of parents point, which is that running off on tangents is not the purpose of the corporation.

By 2020, the "purpose of a corporation", both in the general sense of "what are corporations for?" and the specific sense (e.g. "what is Intel for?") has become fairly unclear.

Maybe it actually is in the interests of <some-group> that Intel runs off on tangents. How would we establish that? Well, we'd have to have some understanding of what the purpose of the corporation is. I don't claim to have any special insight into that, I'm just pointing out that claiming that its purpose is maximising shareholder revenue is historically revisionist and inaccurate.

> Societies do this because it is widely believed that it would be impossible for various things to happen without it.

It is not society's business to allow or disallow different kinds of contracts between private parties. If I know that corporation's investors don't have personal liability and still decide to go into business with them, it's my personal decision to accept this risk and not society's. If I so please, I could go into even riskier deals, up to just gifting them my money. It could be a stupid decision, but it's my decision to make, not something that "society" can allow me to do – actually, not society, but it's worst enemy, the government.

Of course, some governments act out of assumptions that you stated, but it's nothing more than just justification for tiranny.

You don't seem to understand the history of corporations at all.

They don't exist and were not created to sell potentially risky products to eager consumers. They were created to engage in capital-requiring efforts (notably expeditions, but also large scale resource extraction and industrial projects) that would not happen without the personal liability release.

They would not happen because the potential for liability related to the endeavor was clear to all (i.e. people would likely die, and vast amounts of money might be lost).

But societies (and notably royal families) wanted those things to happen, and so they create corporate charters to encourage them to do so.

We could make do without corporate charters, but then we'd also likely be making do without most of things they enabled, because essentially nobody would have had the guts to bet their own personal liability on what were clearly risky and dangerous endeavors.

I know history of corporations pretty well, from hundred years war and british and dutch maritime corporation's, thank you. But history is not ethics: what is and what ought to be are two very different things, not to be confused. Explaining how and why something hapenned historically has only tangential relation to how it should happen and how should we view it from an ethical standpoint, and I was talking about the latter, not the former.

So you're in the camp of "we'll do without silicon fabrication plants entirely, thank you very much", because I can pretty much guarantee you that the liability that creating the initial versions of this technology would have ensured insufficient capital to proceed.

As another comments notes, corporate limited liability is not just, or even primarily, about liability towards your business partners. Build a factory, pollute the water, and without limited liability, you are ruined (which some would argue is the way things ought to be).

You misunderstand the reach of limited liability. It caps liability not merely w.r.t. consumers/vendors/employees etc, but to anyone whatsoever, even a person who has no relationship with a corporation and did not enter into a contract with it.

> The purpose of a corporation... to maximize returns for its investors.

That's a common misunderstanding.

"In nearly all legal jurisdictions, disinterested and informed directors have the discretion to act in what they believe to be the interest of the business corporate entity, even if this differs from maximizing profits for present shareholders. Usually maximizing shareholder value is not a legal obligation, but the product of the pressure that activist shareholders, stock-based compensation schemes and financial markets impose on corporate directors." [1]

[1] https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...

Lmao you're on this again. Stockholders control the company. Their goal and "purpose of a corporation" are synonyms, even if legally companies aren't forced to maximize profits. In fact, the legal requirements have nothing to do with the purpose of the company.

I was really hoping to avoid going off on this tangent. To be more precise, I was comparing existing-in-perpetuity vs maximizing-investor-returns, and the latter is a more important goal. Whether corporations should prioritize morality and employee/customer interests, is a whole other discussion that is best debated elsewhere.

> This is a controversial opinion, but I don't agree with the idea that big corporations should make an entry into every single adjacent market. If the company has core expertise and advantages that can deliver a decisive win in a known-lucrative market, then it's a no brainer. But if that's not the case, why run around chasing shadows everywhere, instead of focusing on harvesting the markets where you're already winning.

The risk is that a competitor comes out of these adjacent markets and edges you out. That's what's looking likely to happen with ARM, which is slowly moving from embedded / cellphone to laptops and servers.

No company operates this way. Companies are full of people optimizing for their own fortunes, and the company going under is not and will never be a part of those plans.

Many creative productions take on a similar structure to what he proposes. Many entities, some individuals, some partnerships, and some corporations, come together to produce a single work. The associations dissolve when the work is finished.

Films, albums, festivals, etc.

Hmmm. I do not agree because this is very much an unless they succeed kind of parable and then you can spin it another way. Apple is now a chip company? I guess avoid apple because them re-inventing themselves all the time is your worst nightmare as an investor.