This "fiduciary duty" meme really needs to die.
Seriously the idea of fiduciary duty [to maximixe profit] is dystopian, corporations don't fuck us over because they have to they do it because they can.
Edit: clarify
(In general the maximize profit meme does need to die tho)
which was added thanks to your parent comment.
The relevant legal standard is "Don't abuse the company for your own ends", not "you must do everything to get as much money as quickly as possible, consequences be damned!"
This would be an interesting test case. The limits on what he can or cannot do are remarkably ill-defined.
Those organizations and people that adopt the meme become more powerful and choke out all those entities that don't.
You can't just choose not to pursue profits at any cost if there are ANY competing entities out there that choose to do so.
Why that is is where the fundamental disagreement is. One of the proposed reasons is too much regulation, the other is too little. It's (in my opinion) probably both - too much poorly applied, and not enough where it's needed.
The second paragraph gives two such cases: AP Smith Manufacturing Co v. Barlow and Shlensky v. Wrigley.
> At the same time, the case affirmed the business judgment rule
What is the business judgement rule?
> The business judgment rule is a case law-derived doctrine in corporations law that courts defer to the business judgment of corporate executives.
In other words, if the CEO of a company says that he did something because e.g. he believed it was better for the long-term health of the company, the court will generally take his word for it, barring evidence of deliberate malfeasance.
What one cannot do is as Ford did, which was to deliberately try and hurt other shareholders.
Hunt around for just a few minutes on the google search, "do corporations have a legal obligation to maximize share value," and you'll see that what you said is the myth that gets repeated -- this one link probably summarizes the argument against the myth in the most neutral way:
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...
To summarize the case, Ford was sitting on a huge amount of cash. Some shareholders, in particular the Dodge brothers, wanted it paid out as dividends. Ford said no, and specifically:
"My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes"
Had he said less, or even nothing, that would have been fine. Management is entitled to make whatever business-related decisions they see fit (the "business judgement" rule). If the Dodges disagree with those decisions, they can sell their shares and reinvest the money elsewhere.
Had Ford said more "...and we think doing so will grow the market for our cars", "help us retain our skilled and motivated workforce" or something else vaguely related to success of Ford Motor Company, that also would have been fine.
Unfortunately, what Ford said fell into a gap where it was clear that what he was doing was not a business decision; he was using the shareholders' money for his own personal ends, charitable though they may be. Shlensky v. Wrigley is an interesting comparison. The Cubs refused to have night baseball games due to some...idiosyncratic beliefs about the "true nature" of the sport. This reduced their potential profits, but was nevertheless okay because chasing after the "purists" OR going for mass-market appeal are both reasonable business decisions.
(This is not my argument; it's made in this article: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1384/)