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