"most investors want to invest in companies whose explicit purpose is making money for the investors".
Rational investors should favor companies whose explicit purpose at least resembles a value proposition, which "PROFIT$!" does not.
The second law of thermodynamics is always at fault
The second law is unfortunately taking us to B eventually, but it's also responsible for the journey from A to where we are today!
A being the Big Bang and B being heat death (est. 1.7×10^106 years).
[0] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240202-has-b-corp-cer...
Ultimately everyone(customers, employees, the company, longer term investors) loses except the investors who are able to influence the company's direction and priorities.
Profitable companies must be providing valuable goods and services to customers.
In the long run the customer is king.
Traded companies don't exist in the long run, they exist to the quarter and if they 'screw up' (whatever that means) they are punished by the short sellers.
Companies can work just fine for some period of time providing nothing of value and long as they can keep investors hooked to the slot machine. I mean, this is typically how every boom/bust cycle works. The problem with boom/bust cycles is they can have society destabilizing effects if they are large enough. They key is moderating behaviors to avoid the worst outcomes.
Let's play with a silly analogy to example this. Farmers find out they can make a lot of money very quickly growing a cash crop of drugs. It only takes a few months to grow so they can harvest a few times a season. Huge numbers of farmers jump on this and achieve record profits... Then fall comes around and everybody starts asking "Where's the food at".
In the US at least this hasn't been true for a very long time. You only have to look at "YCombinator Top 100" to see multiple companies losing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars of investor money for years
It's a pump and dump scheme with more steps.
A) Milton Friedman: Shareholder profits > All. "...the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible. As such, the goal of the firm is to increase its profits and maximize returns to shareholders." [2]
B) Peter Drucker: Customer has primary focus. "A company's primary responsibility is to serve its customers. Profit is not the primary goal, but rather an essential condition for the company's continued existence and sustainability." [3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZQ7x0-MZcI&t=5205s
It's up to the people buying my labour to decide whether it's useful for them, we're not all the same.
A company isn't perfectly equivalent to a person, but does exist as a tool so people can accomplish goals. If two people have no calling, have no passions, and they start a company that expresses their personal goals of survival, what's wrong with that?
Can you find a company that committed capitol murder? Or are they supposed to just execute one to test your theory, even if they're not guilty?
That's not true. Yes, corporate personhood exists to make things like forming a contract with or suing a corporation possible without a whole bunch of extra laws. But corporate personhood is not declaring corporations totally equivalent to natural persons. Corporations, for example, cannot vote or get married and probably can't adopt kids in any state.
The trouble, I think, is that some people want to keep corporations, but to somehow keep a leash on them so that they're only weaponized against their enemies. If you truly hated corporate personhood, instead, you might start talking about how corporations shouldn't be allowed in any circumstances. You can't keep a leash on them. They're effectively immortal, enormously rich beyond even billionaires, and have agendas. Like, I'm not exaggerating... they have agendas, and can play a long game. You'll never politically neutralize them as long as they exist, and unneutralized they will just continue to chip away until they've got their legal personhood back.
The ones that were created in the US over eighteen years ago and haven't been convicted of a felony can. The same is not true of corporations, because they're not legally equivalent to humans.
Precisely. Companies exist so that people can work together to accomplish goals that are difficult to accomplish separately. I'm suggesting that 'make money' should not be a sufficient goal. Companies are not a natural thing — we decide the laws that govern them.