> You're obliged to maximize their earnings.
Sometimes I think it’s time to give shareholder supremacy a rest. If they don’t like what they own, they can sell it. But this is probably also why I’m not on a board of directors.
Interestingly enough, Apple at one point had that attitude even under Cook.
> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI,” Cook said. “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.”
That was back in 2014.
But I do agree, it's time to normalize telling shareholders where they can shove it. If they don't like it, they can sell.
Ironically (and perversely) it's much easier to do this with exotic cap tables that keep voting rights and ownership effectively split. You needed a very valuable company to make this work and the most obvious example (Meta) is not exactly a beacon of corporate governance.
I don’t see how this is the case? The CEO can absolutely tell the board to shove it. The board can’t micromanage the CEO - they don’t have the levers to do that. So their options are few, and pretty much all nuclear along the lines of firing the CEO. Is the Apple board going to fire Tim Cook for making iPhones accessible? If they did, they’d find themselves fired by the shareholders.