E.g. creating a company with a business model which benefits from taxing CO2 emissions (Tesla) is morally great. Whereas having a business model which benefits from cheap oil (VW) is less so. Product decisions (electric vs. fuel engines) have a large effect on your long-term financial interests.
There are bits in the law about management having a fiduciary duty to shareholders, but that mainly means that they aren't supposed to be stuffing their own pockets at the expense of investors. There's a wide birth for management to decide what kinds of profit are and are not worth it.
This change may even depress the stock price directly as disgusted owners sell (this harms the ability of current shareholders to earn a return, as the loss is now but the future revenues are discounted).
The market is as moral as its shareholders, which is far less than perfection but a lot better than zero.
The case in question is Dodge vs. Ford and rather than believe memes about it just read the darn wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
I'm all for pointing someone to the sources, but let's not instill the idea that consulting Wikipedia is doing substantially more diligent research than looking at memes.
That doesn't mean that making money is not important to these people; of course it is. But it's not the only factor.
Companies build a vision or image for how they behave and a lot of that is going to be driven by marketability.
For example Microsoft has taken a very pro-developer stance since Satya Nadella took over. Not just because it's directly profitable to be pro-developer, but because it helps their long term image, culture etc. This goes a long way to explaining a lot of their recent actions like helping Github be available in Iran again and open sourcing large parts of C# / .NET.
So the question becomes: are Apple being pro-privacy because it's a long term stance they want to take and make a basis for their company culture because it's something their customers really want. Or are they taking the stance simply because it doesn't impact their own profitability right now, but would drop it if there was an obvious potential income stream.
And thus is indirectly profitable.
> That's quite an extreme-end of capitalist way of looking at it.
It's only extreme if you can show that companies routinely take the moral stance even when it impacts their short- or long-term profitability. Is Microsoft good now despite its best interests, just because it decided to take a moral stance?