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Comment by oarsinsync | Hacker News Reader

> when it's literally a companies goal to pay people as little as is functionally possible

The meme that “fiduciary duty” means “maximise revenue at all costs” needs to die. This is a falsehood that has been debunked repeatedly.

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Your two sentences in this thread is hardly debunking anything. What is Amazon maximizing if not profit? It certainly is not employee share of revenue or employee well being.

The point is that there’s no law that says companies must maximize profit at the expense of everything else. The fiduciary duty is to be responsible with shareholder’s money, not to maximize return on investment.

It doesn't matter if it is the law or not if Amazon is made up of a large group of managers with competing interests that all boil to maximizing profit in order to meet their individual key goals. The GP said nothing about it being the law, simply that it is how Amazon, as a giant megacorporation, acts in practice.

It does matter because assuming it as a matter-of-fact prevents discussing or even conceiving alternatives. It prevents you from asking: What should the companies fiduciary duty be? (Perhaps respecting the law and not busting unions?)

Corporations are allowed to exist to create a positive net good. ie: the social contract works so long as we can plausibly reason that they, you know, actually benefit people more than they harm. Maximizing profit is a lie told to children for reasons I won't get into, but when it displaces the social contract, the end result is a justification of all sorts of socially pathological behavior, this included.

Everything you just said stopped being true in the 70s and 80s. Yes, B-corps are a thing, but the laws as currently constructed encourage profit extraction above nearly everything else.

That would be true if people believed economists like Milton Friedman created reality instead of what was really much more mundane. Those who do so are attributing supernatural powers to a mere mortal.

It is true, regardless of what you believe. There is a ton if empirical evidence for it.

Having the patience to push and set legal precedent isn't a superpower. Not sure what your point is here.

I just don't base truth on what Milton Friedman supposedly says or what legal precedent is. There are much better epistemological firmaments than those on which to ground reality.

Corporations have no fiduciary duty to produce a profit. Thinking that they do has been attributed to Milton Friedman's 1971 NY editorial [0], but some argue that the notion can't be pinned on him [1] It's more accurate to say that fiduciary responsibilities are to ensure the corporation doesn't violate the law and that the firm doesn't go out of business [2].

[0] 'The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits', Friedman

[1] https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Shareholder-Value-Myth-Shareholders-C...

The only point of a company is to maximize shareholder value. You're right, that doesn't always mean "maximize revenue at all costs.” It usually does though, because especially as a growth company that's what shareholders want. Obviously there are competing priorities, but overall most shareholders want to maximize discounted profit, and all their priorities reflect how that should be done.

That’s not true though. The shareholders are people so what they want are as varied as what people want.

Does Elon want SpaceX to be super profitable or does he want to make life multi planetary? (They aren’t mutually exclusive, but it’s weird to think that he is just trying to make as much profit as possible).

One can also consider that the state is also a party because they license and privilege corporations and stockholders.

> but it’s weird to think that he is just trying to make as much profit as possible

Why is it weird to think that?

More wealth isn’t enough to satiate his ego, he absolutely craves legacy. As of now he’ll still be a small footnote in history, kids will likely learn about Henry Ford 150 years from now but Musk isn’t worth much of an appearance. Tesla is just an iterative step in EV / battery manufacturing, and is likely to be dwarfed by competition over the next 50 years, even if it does really well.

SpaceX gives him the chance to truly make history. People will learn about our first manned trip to Mars and the first colony. Perhaps even for thousands of years.

I wasn’t trying to guess his motives. More his actions don’t match someone trying to maximise profit.

Because all their profits come from NASA and starlink… so building a mars capable vehicle doesn’t really make sense from the profit motive perspective. It won’t be profitable in his lifetime.

People in control have much more ability to have the company execute their vision. As an investor the only thing you can do is say yes or no to management. Since the group of investors all have different side goals the one thing they agree on is making money, so management optimizes for that. Then everyone sees that the company exists to make money, so people that are interested in other things self select out. In the end all the shareholders are interested in maximizing the share price.

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