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Comment by jms703 | Hacker News Reader

Shareholders would never ever be ok with a company not trying to be maximally profitable.

Tim Cook told people they should sell their shares if they wanted Apple to abandon environmental sustainability policies. And he identified accessibility as a similar issue.[1]

[1] https://www.macobserver.com/news/tim-cook-rejects-ncppr-poli...

That's why Tesla stock tanked as soon as the FT wrote that "$1.4bn appears to have gone astray." ;)

https://www.ft.com/content/62df8d8d-31f2-445e-bfa2-c171ac43d...

What's Tesla's forward PE? Close to 200? I don't think we can use them as an example of anything resembling a sane market.

Edit: Found a link to the article content, I gather that's basically the point you're making?

> What's Tesla's forward PE? Close to 200?

Nope, close to 300 actually…

That's trailing PE. A standard response to that observation would be that the market is forward looking. So I try to stick to forward PE when discussing price. 200 is still insane in any case, it's an order of magnitude higher than, for example, GOOG.

Yes, the point I was trying to make is that companies can get away with not being maximally profitable. There's nothing legally stopping Apple from accepting a slightly lower profit margin on the 5% of sales volume that might go to smaller iPhones if they would offer them. But it might brighten the day for millions of customers.

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