The legal standard is not to "maximize profits."

You are correct. I was wrong on the standard. They have a duty insofar as they know shareholders will replace them via voting power if they displease the majority of their shareholders, and generally shareholders want to increase value or dividends. However, that's not always the case. Shareholders could generally desire anything else. Thank you for the correction.

They're firing people cause of a meme, not cause anyone made a business case as you are implying.

A meme: that times are tough and firing people will free up capital.

It's a meme my boy. people are losing their jobs cause CEOs need to "make tough decisions".

They're not doing business evaluations. They're following the herd. A meme.

They are laying people off because now is the time to do it so people don't think twice about it. Best way to remove dead weight with little consequence.

Seems like the meme based leadership is working if they are bringing in record profits and conducting stocks Buybacks.

Feel free to remind me if they go into bankruptcy

Perhaps record corporate profits is not something society should optimize for if it accompanies large amounts of disruption in the lives of people.

When you've spent the past 30 years ensuring that your plate is always filled first by buying out the political class, of course you'll get record profits.

That don't stop your decisions from being arbitrary and just following the herd.

A bunch of emotionally stunted amature stoics who heard a ted talk about decimating legions have a go at it for themselves

This is an oft repeated misrepresentation. In the US, case-law shows there is a fiduciary duty to the corporation itself, not the shareholders. And there are no laws or regulations which require the maximization of profits.

Yes, I was wrong. This helped to clear it up. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...

That said, voting shareholders could replace management if they deemed them to act differently than they think the next best candidate could. So there is some risk in deciding not to try and maximize the short or long (depending on voters) value of the company.

This helps to explain why the index giants like Vanguard are getting away with pushing their nonsense ESG on companies.