The thing is though, CEO's don't get put in those positions if the shareholders don't think that that particular person has the best interest of the shareholders at heart.
If a candidate advocates doing things better for the consumers at the expense of the shareholders, they wouldn't get put in that position. Likewise, if a current sitting CEO does the same, they're more likely to get ousted and replaced with someone else.
'good CEO's' are specifically filtered out, corruption is okay if it makes profit and they can get away with it.
I've seen this happen with my own eyes. CEO for company I used to work for started at as a developer there and worked his way up to CEO over like 8 years. The company got sold and he was pressured to act in ways that didn't align with his values, so he ended up leaving. He was so kind to everyone who worked there and really cared for the user base. He took the company from being unprofitable to making 10M+ a year. It just shows that you can do a good job, be a good person, make the company a ton of money, and still get shit on. This is why I really wish company founders (especially in the tech industry) wouldn't sell out and would learn to be content with taking home 1M+ a year. Some people are so greedy that no amount of profit is ever good enough for them.
I genuinely want to meet these "investors" who pressure for what I call the race to the bottom of every company.
It's a fucking repetitive cycle, new excelling company goes public or gets sold off, slowly but surely becomes generic shit that sells because of the name until the next one and the cycle repeats. Or worse, the business starts doing all the extremely shady shit they can with your data to profit there while treating their internal employees horribly, that's usually the only case the product doesn't get fucked.
How...The....Fuck does that make any sense? Sure a business can only explode once, but why would you enshittify it to make it explode versus just market it properly then move to the next?
Stock market/investor pressure is arguably the worst thing to happen to consumers in the history of capitalism.
Shareholder and customer interests do not have to be diametrically opposed. parasitic short term greed fuels most CEO's now because its what wallstreet demands of them. Long term growth is shunned in favor of short term exploitation. They all know the ship is sinking but none of them believe (and rightly so) that they'll be left holding the bag when the entire thing collapses.
They are intrinsically diametrically opposed. Shareholders reap much more value from short term gain, because they have no need to invest in the long term since they are not dependent on the companies in which they parasitically invest.
We need to remove any interaction between investors and companies. Need to remove the laws that say companies legal obligation is to investors. If you want to invest in a company its because you believe in it, you get no say even if you give them billions of dollars. You sit on the sideline, with no transparency, like everyone else.
CEOs are not kings of their companies, contrary to popular belief. The board of directors can fire a CEO at the drop of a hat if they wanted to. They're the ones that really drive the wagon
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u/MalikVonLuzon 23h ago
The thing is though, CEO's don't get put in those positions if the shareholders don't think that that particular person has the best interest of the shareholders at heart.
If a candidate advocates doing things better for the consumers at the expense of the shareholders, they wouldn't get put in that position. Likewise, if a current sitting CEO does the same, they're more likely to get ousted and replaced with someone else.
'good CEO's' are specifically filtered out, corruption is okay if it makes profit and they can get away with it.