I wanna surface this to my main timeline because it's kinda important to say out loud from time to time:

Businesses do NOT "have to" focus exclusively on their return to shareholders. Not legally, not morally.

That is the misguided OPINION of a 1970 essay by Milton Friedman, and the fact that everyone seemed to just hop on board that opinion is a significant reason why we switched gears into hyper-hell-capitaliam since then.

Push back on this every time you see it.

@danhulton Abso-fuckin'-lutely. In fact, I venture to say that doing so, and the expectation that it is the "right" thing to do, are destructive to the companies, the economy, and society as a whole. The management theories touted by the Harvard School of Business and its clones support and encourage stripping businesses for their assets, destroying jobs, empoverishing workers, enshittifying products, cheating on taxes, increasing unequality, externalizing costs, monopolistic practices, ... in short everything that is wrong with greed capitalism. The Harvard School of Business is quite simply the Harvard class training its members how to most efficiently loot and plunder civilization of everything that isn't bolted down, while pretending to the rest of the planet that doing so is just good business sense and strengthens the economy.