[userlander]

Andreessen: I’ll speak for the group because there’s a lot of similarities between the different players here for the same pressures. I’ll just speak for the group. First of all, let me disabuse you of something, if you haven’t already disabused yourself. The view of American C.E.O.s operating as capitalist profit optimizers is just completely wrong. That’s like, Goal No. 5 or something. There’s four goals that are way more important than that. And that’s not just true in the big tech companies. It’s true of the executive suite of basically everyone at the Fortune 500. I would say Goal No. 1 is, “I’m a good person.” “I’m a good person,” is wildly more important than profit margins. Wildly. And this is why you saw these big companies all of a sudden go completely bananas in all their marketing. It’s why you saw them go bananas over D.E.I. It’s why you saw them all cooperating with all these social media boycotts. I mean, the level of lock step uniformity, unanimity in the thought process between the C.E.O.s of the Fortune 500 and what’s in the pages of The New York Times and in the Harvard classroom and in the Ford Foundation — they’re just locked together. Or at least they were through this entire period.

I find it’s funny, because the only true groups of people who think that corporate C.E.O.s are just profit-optimizing machines are people on the far left, who are full-on Marxists, who really believe that, and then people on the far right, who I think fear that the C.E.O.s are like that but also maybe hope that they are and then later realize that they’re not.

What bollocks. I'm a capitalist and believe corporate CEOs are all profit optimizing machines. Isn't their god Milton Friedman, the man who made every corporation feel it was their duty to maximize shareholder profits? Can't have it both ways Marc.

Can't stand this spineless man.

(Edit for italics)