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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8940487" data-attributes="member: 19857">Yes, that was darjr's point in response to a comparison being made to an executive at a private company. Discussions of how private company executives act are not necessarily relevant to how publicly traded executives act.Private companies have a completely different dynamic - usually you have one owner or at worst a family of owners to keep happy with a private company. They basically want to get paid and having a profitable company that they get a piece of the profits of every year aligns with their desire to basically just get paid. A company that flashes up for a year and then fails spectacularly impacts their long term ability to extract money from the company and so keeping the owner happy tends to align with making the company successful in the long term.Publicly traded companies are beasts which have no owner, just lots of people who own a piece. And those people increasingly don't care about the long term value of the company because the amount they get from the company directly (i.e. dividend) is a pittance compared to how much they paid for the (overpriced) shares of stock that they're sitting on. So what they want is the perceived value of the company to go up so they can dump the stock on some other sucker at an inflated price and get out. A company's stock price tripling overnight and then crashing to nothing is great for those types so long as they sell high and get out.Not all publicly traded companies fall into the trap of giving top priority to investors whose only concern is dumping your stock at the soonest possible opportunity, but when it happens ooh boy it's bad for everyone who works for the company except the execs with the golden parachutes and the folks who sold their stock when it hit that high (and sometimes those are the same people). But a whole lot of corporate pathology in publicly traded companies can be traced right back to the model of trying to keep "shareholders" who don't care about the health of the company at all happier than the folks who are interested in its long term survival.</blockquote>

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