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A comment on Meta employees grill Mark Zuckerberg at all-hands meeting following layoffs. Parent comment

Re:Meta employees grill Mark Zuckerberg at all-hands meeting... by Firmwarrior on Saturday March 18, 2023 @02:58AM (#35206822)
I'm really tired of this mental virus that's taken over bad CEOs, the imaginary responsibility to shareholders:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

It was actually cooked up in the 70s by Milton Friedman, and over the ensuing few decades it's gone so viral that even its opponents think it's true.

Companies have a responsibility not to just annihilate the shareholders' money for no reason whatsoever, but they have a LOT of leeway to make risky investments or go off on tangents. Executives are NOT legally or morally required to screw people over for an extra short-term buck.

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Re:Meta employees grill Mark Zuckerberg at all-hands meeting... by WalterBright on Saturday March 18, 2023 @03:41AM (#35207014)
> NOT legally or morally required to screw people over for an extra short-term buck

I saw nothing in the Friedman doctrine that says anything about prioritizing short term results.

But if the company doesn't do what the shareholders want, the shareholders sell, and the stock price goes down.

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Re:Meta employees grill Mark Zuckerberg at all-hands meeting... by cbzbc on Saturday March 18, 2023 @04:01AM (#35207137)
Friedman had a very mystical conception of the market - viewing almost as a collective intelligence - and would say in this case that its judgment of the company strategy was correct.
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Re:Meta employees grill Mark Zuckerberg at all-hands meeting... by WalterBright on Saturday March 18, 2023 @04:16AM (#35207235)
I haven't seen any evidence that Friedman advocated short term profits over long term results.
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Re:Meta employees grill Mark Zuckerberg at all-hands meeting... by cbzbc on Saturday March 18, 2023 @08:08AM (#35208393)
His view would be that if the stock price went up as a result of some action then that action would be the right one (its orthogonal to the point about short term profits).
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Re:Meta employees grill Mark Zuckerberg at all-hands meeting... by aaomidi on Saturday March 18, 2023 @11:47AM (#35210045)
Agreed, this is the definition of short term profits
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Re:Meta employees grill Mark Zuckerberg at all-hands meeting... by WalterBright on Saturday March 18, 2023 @03:47PM (#35212446)
> this is the definition of short term profits

That's not remotely true. Stock prices are based on long term fiscal results. If shareholders get a whiff of a company sacrificing long term results for short term profits, the share price tanks.

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Re:Meta employees grill Mark Zuckerberg at all-hands meeting... by Firmwarrior on Saturday March 18, 2023 @02:25PM (#35211732)
Yeah, but even here you have people parroting this line about "responsibility to shareholders to maximize profits" which is blatantly untrue. You're free to be a sociopathic monster within the limits of the law, but you aren't REQUIRED to.
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Re:Meta employees grill Mark Zuckerberg at all-hands meeting... by WalterBright on Saturday March 18, 2023 @06:21PM (#35213716)
If you entrust your money to someone else to invest for you, what are you expecting?
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Re:Meta employees grill Mark Zuckerberg at all-hands meeting... by corbulo on Saturday March 18, 2023 @05:04AM (#35207460)
It's more about 10-Q reports than any particular philosophy. Quarterly earnings is a big deal universally for public companies.
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