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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I can’t say I follow your logic at all.

Companies exist to make money. Investors invest to make money. Investors have a desire (and sometimes a right) to be heard.

But just because the investor has strong opinions and wants to be heard, it doesn’t mean Google has to listen or act.

This is all operating precisely as it is meant to.

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> Companies exist to make money

Fiduciary duty isn't the same as company mission or purpose.

If Google did not provide some sort of product or service it would not need to exist as a company. Even if Google were a pure research lab without obvious consumer or business products or services it would still be doing non-financial work that someone thought provided some kind of benefit.

Investors are not Google's only stakeholders. Without customers or employees (for example) Google would cease to exist. Google may also discover that the general public is another stakeholder.

Google's mission statement[1] isn't actually "to make as much money as possible" or even "to provide maximum value to shareholders" but rather "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

[1] https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/

Yes yes, though you forgot the "(except on Windows phone)" part ;P... but the issue is that if the company ever has to make a serious decision between better organizing the world's information and making more money for shareholders and it doesn't optimize for the money, then that's where the fiduciary duty part comes in and why it seems entirely fair to say that that's the company's actual purpose, not whatever tag line makes them feel better about it (and yes: this is why public companies are essentially all inherently evil).

Public Benefit Corporations are one solution to this dilemma and they can be publicly traded.

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/public-benefit-corporat...

There's no fiduciary duty to make money for shareholders - that's Friedman's Big Lie that's been memed into virtual law.

The fiduciary duty of company board to shareholders is to not steal or flagrantly mismanage the company (for example by actions benefit board members but negatively impact company operations).

Making a profit and sharing it with shareholders is not a requirement nor duty.

"companies exist to make money" and "investors Invest to make money" are very poor arguments.

In what time horizon do companies/investors expect to make and how much money?

This investor bought in since 2017. Has they sold at the last stock peak they would have made much money.

Tangentially... Why do we call people who buy stock on the secondary market "investors?" To me, the investors are the ones who gave the money to the INVESTMENT, i.e., Google in the present case. Everyone else who buys the stock from these investors are not investors, but speculators or some other word. The company already has the money, and gets nothing (beyond possibly a vote) from these people.

Companies sell shares in order to raise cash. At some point Google had to sell shares in order to receive liquidity from the public markets. The people who bought those shares are investors in Google. Buying a share from another investor still represents the same equity ownership from which the original share was purchased.

Google has tons of money - they don't care about what resellers of their stock are doing.

Companies can exist for all sorts of reasons. Making money is one of them, but it isn't exhaustive.

Whether it is their primary mission or not, companies that don’t make money usually don’t last very long.

(Even when, sadly, a lot of them make their money via taxpayer-funded bailouts…)

What you say is as true of people as it is of companies. Do you think making money is all there is to life?

People who don’t breathe air or drink water will die. Does that mean breathing and drinking are all there is to life?

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