The fact that their primary concern has to be for their shareholders and not whether the sale will be good at all for the rest of humanity is a huge problem in my eyes.
You don't have 300 million people (including heads of state) outside your house (that you jointly own with millions of other people) standing on your lawn interacting with each other and the rest of the world.
What if instead of a house we were talking about a small business that serves people. Can that business not sell itself to someone else?
Property rights and the government stepping in to force changes don't interact well, and goes against a free market type system. The government does step in sometimes, but usually when they see what's being done as being anti-competitive and hurting people through reducing market effectiveness, not just because they've made some moral judgement. Personally I'm happy they're not doing the latter, I suspect quite a lot of people would not agree with the judgements they were making at any specific time, depending on the specific groups in power.
Then when we look at examples of these things causing harm rather than leading to good outcomes, people shout and say "Hey you can't do that, its a free market!"
If people want to use the argument that free markets should be able to cause harm if they want then people need to stop using the argument that free markets are good because of all the good they consistently do.
Tobacco advertising, pollution, lead gasoline... Clearly we do make moral choices and, as a democracy, pass laws restricting some activities. The world is not encompassed by The Profit Motive.
I'm not quite sure that unrestricted hyper-optimised misery factories are the thing we should be shooting for.
We do, but I think it's rare, and much rarer than that list would imply. I see most of those as clear issues of public health. The one where that's a harder claim to make, advertising, it's about making the market function better. Free markets requires require widely distributed and accurate information to function correctly, and false information is extremely damaging to a free market.
> I'm not quite sure that unrestricted hyper-optimised misery factories are the thing we should be shooting for.
Neither am I. I'm not some free market only anti-regulation type. I think a completely unregulated market is trivially shown to be unworkable by our own history, so regulation is required to curtail blatant market manipulation. I even think more regulation restricting the size of large companies (or disincentivizing them) would be useful, but I think they need to be applied to foreign companies as well or we're just hurting ourselves without solving any problem.
There's probably a hundred ways that is infeasible and has problems, but it's obvious there are real problems to address with inequality and outsized companies with outsized influence, and something needs to change. I'm just hesitant to couch it in moral terms when it comes to what the government can and should do, because I think that's a slippery slope.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)
I know very little about public trading or the laws regarding it - especially compared to many other HN users - but here's my novice response:
Think about why that's a rule. The board doesn't own the company; the shareholders do. The board's role is to make decisions on behalf of the shareholders. The rule exists to ensure they do exactly that.
A board deciding to financially harm the investors they represent for the "good of humanity" goes against the very concept of investment. A public company intentionally acting against the financial interests of its owners would see its stock value immediately collapse, causing immense damage to its shareholders, employees, and customers.
If you want a company to act "for the good of humanity", it has to either be privately owned or align with the financial interests of its investors.
It does not. It goes against a very specific concept of investment, which is that I should be able to buy a thing and make money with absolutely zero regard for anybody else. It is not a rule of the universe that owning something should allow me to harm others.
But this isn't about what rights a company has. This is about the obligations a board has to act on behalf of its shareholders within legal limits.
Please don't confuse my comments for an approval of public companies choosing financial gain over the good of others. This is one of the primary reasons why I am very critical of companies going public. Going public essentially means a company sells its soul for investment money. The owners and investors may see a big payout, but the potential long-term good a company can do is handicapped as soon as it goes public.
Hence the idea that anything is justified as long as it gooses the stock price, and that a corporation has no social obligations whatsoever.
In reality, there has been more or less exactly one successful invocation of the concept in history, against Craig Newmark, when he explicitly said he was going to do something that would harm shareholders.
In reality, you do whatever you want and if anybody complains you tell them it's good PR and will therefore benefit shareholders in the long run. You can be as wrong about that as you want as long as you manage to avoid explicitly stating that you know to be wrong.
But also it's the job of the regulatory body to be the check for society
Shareholders seems like the best of the worst type scenarios. They have skin in the game, they are countable, they have legal status.
That's the tricky thing with making the case to steward corporations democratically. Just for example, my parents don't know anything about Twitter except its name. I think they would find the government regulating Twitter to be an overreach of democracy simply because it's not something they know or even care about.
Legally, the Board can consider stakeholder goals and morality. I think if Musk announced a profitable-but-legal foray into genocide, you could urge shareholders to reject it, and no court will hold otherwise.
But at some point the shareholders can overrule you. And in those cases, we find management’s highest goal is usually preserving their own special salary, not the “interests of humanity.”
Welcome to capitalism.