[advael]

I, like you, am in the tech world and know plenty of founders who are great people who have visions and want various things. Once they are running a company, it doesn't take long for this to matter less and less. Even in the early stages of a startup, the priority will shift quickly to whatever gets the next round of funding. In the case of a company that has become large, there is virtually zero chance that the wheel can be steered away from whatever the aggregate algorithm used to weigh the priorities of the shareholders and make a decision thinks will be profitable. This isn't in practice always what ends up the most profitable, but it's what will happen because that's how the structure of the organization works

[hot_gril]

2008-ish was an annoying time of "this isn't just a startup, it's a movement" (to make me rich). Apple says privacy is a human right. I wouldn't say that companies only care about money, but ones who advertise their own altruism are probably not telling the truth.

[advael]

People - including some people who hold positions like CEO or sit on a board for a company - can care about things other than money. Companies can't, essentially by definition. This is intrinsic to how they are legally constructed

[hot_gril]

They can't legally claim to care about something besides money (even this I'm unsure about), but if the leadership cares, they can steer the company a certain way.

[lores]

That's an urban legend, as you suspect, at least in the US and UK - there's nothing in the law requiring to maximise profits.

https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-compan...

[hot_gril]

So it's really only applicable when something egregious like a conflict of interest is at play. Not surprised by that.

"In Shlensky v Wrigley, a famous American case, the firm that owned the Chicago Cubs baseball team refused to hold games at night, even though this would have increased profits and value. The director, Mr Wrigley, argued that installing lights for the games would disturb the peace of the surrounding environment." Good example of it not being 100% about money.

[advael]

Sure, and as with other optimizing systems, as the process of growth continues, the degree to which those priorities are correlated with ROI will gradually increase, selecting against aspects of them that are anticorrelated from the getgo, but eventually coming for ones that are merely uncorrelated as more investment allows more steering by shareholders, and in the world of private equity, likely some of the merely-weakly-correlated priorities as well (and in some cases, even the business' survival will be sacrificed in favor of something that benefits an aggregate portfolio in a particular quarter)