How Executives Get Rich Making Poor Decisions | Cold Take
This week's episode of Cold Take is now available!
How Executives Get Rich Making Poor Decisions | Cold Take (YouTube)
Comments (6)
This was one of the better CTs (not that they are ever bad). Nice work!
The past few Cold Takes were depressingly bleak. Frost, are you okay?
Enjoyed this break down. It makes me frustrated with publicly traded companies, but the video was exceptional.
This touches on the biggest issue - quarter to quarter thinking is rampant, and so many of these things aren't happening because a company isn't profitable, or sometimes not even because it's not profitable enough, but because shareholders will view some incredibly stupid things as just as good, or even better, than actually having made money.
It's arguably obligatory for publicly traded companies. Fiduciary Duty is the key word. They have to act in the best financial interests of their investors, which has been interpreted in at least one court case to mean maximizing profits at the cost of all else. And they need to report profit quarterly, so if it ever doesn't grow in a given 3 month period, or doesn't grow enough, that can be grounds for a lawsuit. The stock market isn't the root of all evil or the only place where this happens, but it sure as hell institutionalizes the worst parts of capitalism that we all love to complain about even if we call it by different names. It's an institution rotten to the core that corrupts all it touches
Thank you for making some sense of why these truly shitty releases and cruel layoffs keep happening