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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Shareholders can do more than just fire the management team, they can set meaningful objectives and tie management compensation to reaching them.

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Yeah, and then the CEO decides he'd rather make $124M that year and feel good about himself in not kowtowing to totalitarian governments vs doing so and making $125M that year. The entire point of this comment thread is that individual people are not motivated solely by money. They care about many other things too, like their values.

Hell, this entire post exists because some Google employees care more about their values than about making as much money as possible.

The only people not motivated solely by money are those who used the very tactics that are in question to amass enough not to care... Or simply have no stake in it, Or have a stake in a competing company.

I can assure you if google employees revolt on a number of projects and that drops the stock price in half over the course of 3 weeks PEOPLE WILL CARE... Even the ones that today you say don't care.

> The only people not motivated solely by money are those who used the very tactics that are in question to amass enough not to care...

There are an awful lot of people in this very comment thread who would claim to be counterexamples to this. Are you going to say they're all lying or deluded about their own motivations?

> The only people not motivated solely by money are those who used the very tactics that are in question to amass enough not to care... Or simply have no stake in it, Or have a stake in a competing company.

What an absurdly preposterous thing to say. Money is a motivator and a large one for many, many people, but it's ridiculous to call it the sole motivator for everyone.

We need to disempower shareholders.

Interesting interview / history on this issue I read recently from the guy behind much of panera bread: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-founder-of-p...

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