[direwolf20]

This isn't solely due to shareholder fiduciary duty. Even without such a duty, the shareholders would fire anyone who doesn't put them first. Even without shares, a sole owner of a company would also do that. No matter your position, you don't get to do things that are bad for your boss, so the ultimate bosses (whoever they are in a given system) hold all the power.

And power has a tendency to accumulate. Powerful people always use their power to increase their power. There are no exceptions.

[wongarsu]

Fiduciary duty effectively turns profit maximization into the only valid goal. Companies with sole owners or family businesses tend to have much more diverse goals. Many of Europe's large companies are still private (certainly more so than in the US), and from the ones I've personally dealt with the image of the founder/owner/family is often a driving concern. That can materialize as better business practices, or as a ruthless business that reinvests a notable part of profits in projects with public benefit, usually locally wherever they are headquartered.

Other examples in the US would include SpaceX, which supposedly is not about profit but about building a mars colony (and so far their actions seem to align with that), or Rupert Murdoch's media empire that's at least as much about spreading right wing views in the anglosphere as it is about money.

[tgv]

That's an Ayn Rand type black and white view of society. Not so long ago, companies were supposed to (and many did) care for continuity, in a broad sense: survival, labor, customer, and product. Nowadays, you would add environment too. Shares were a way of getting more interest than a savings account. Heck, there were even cooperations in which the laborers were shareholders as well.

The word you are looking for is greed.

[TeMPOraL]

Corporations do care for survival and continuity - of themselves. Not the people, not even people working in them or running them - just themselves.

[RandomLensman]

How could a corporation itself care about anything? How would it act itself (without humans), for example, to express such care?

In my experience, it is always people.

[TeMPOraL]

Think in terms of a dynamic system. Or in terms of "selfish gene", as I've observed it to be easier to talk about.

Any single person or group in a corporation is expendable. You can swap out the sales department or a CEO, and the corporation will continue on its course without a pause or major change of direction. No single person or group of people is in total control of the direction - what directs the corporation is the sum total of ideas, vibes, internal influences, bylaws, operating practices, assets, and external environment of competitors and markets and regulatory landscape. The people that make up a corporation may be diverse and have conflicting goals, but if there's one thing they're all aligned on, is that they all want to keep their jobs and increase their pay or influence. I.e. they want the corporation to go on, to survive at least to their next paycheck.

The end result is, a corporation can be seen as an independent entity - kinda like an animal (or a super-colony for more accurate comparison) with a survival drive independent of the people that form it.

[RandomLensman]

If there is a single owner, could shut down the place, for example.

As I said, in my experience, the humans - interchangible or not, as customers, competitors, owners etc - determine what happens, not the corporation itself.

Can look at a corporate as "living thing" itself, but I think that underestimates the human side.

[direwolf20]

Individual neurons determine how your arm moves, but we still speak of a human as a whole being that makes decisions.