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But public stocks seems to focus on valuation over profits, which is reasonable given how things turned out.

Apple going from 1 trillion to 2 trillion valuation is much more valuable to shareholders than Apple paying out 100 billion in profits. But if the stocks aren't publicly traded then the main pay-out are the profits, so they try to maximize profit over growth, which is probably much healthier for the economy overall.

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This is false. Amazon had zero profits for a very long time and was publicly traded. It did very well. There are numerous examples like this.

That is exactly what I said, publicly traded companies cares about growth over profits, while companies that never intends to go public and therefore doesn't benefit from valuations tend to care about profit over growth.

Profit and growth go together. In Amazon's case lots of profit is what fueled their growth: at each point they made far more money than needed to sustain, so they bought growth instead of paying out to shareholders.

The two are intricately related.

Sorry I misread your comment. Either way I don't think either extreme viewpoint is right. I'd say publicly traded companies and their investors care about both growth and profits for different reasons.

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