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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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The difference is HBO is a media company that largely operates in the US, and Jon Oliver making fun of them isn’t going to hurt their business at all. Apple is a hardware company that also makes media. And selling hardware in China is critical to their business. Since the CCP owns China, they can get their panties in a twist and just ban Apple. Like they did with government devices.
As a publicly owned company they have a legal responsibility to maximize profit for shareholders. It’s the same reason why Twitter had to agree to the sale to Elon Musk and why they had to force it. It was a terrible move overall but since Elon was buying all outstanding shares and taking it private, the board literally had no legal choice but to take it since he was offering well over market value.
Public companies don’t get to take moral stands when there’s money on the line. They legally have to put shareholders first.
"Public companies...legally have to put shareholders first."
I thought this too, but it is apparently a myth.
"There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” — even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false.
To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits
Specifically, the thing that is wrong is the idea that the only way to uphold their fiduciary duty to shareholders is to maximize profit. They have a legal obligation to put their shareholders' interest first, and maximizing short term profit is not the only way to do this. Benefit corps give some of their revenue to a cause, sometimes companies invest in long-term stability or profitability.
Rare supreme Court w I guess? I dunno
It’s a good line in what is otherwise a very, very bad SCOTUS decision that a for-profit corporation can ignore laws protecting female employees because of the corporation’s religious beliefs.
So bizarre that companies are capable of believing in gods.
Lol try being a CEO and answering to your shareholders about how you’re not trying to maximize profits and growth. Like it may not be legally required but you’re kind of required to just by the nature of the role itself.
It was put to an actual shareholder vote. The individual shareholders voted yes because he was overpaying. The board was fundamentally irrelevant.
Where’d did this “legal responsibility to maximize profit” bullshit come form?
There is no such law, an no entity to enforce the responsibility.
~Court precedent. Shareholders have sued and won for corporations "failing to uphold fiduciary responsibilities" and other similar bullshit. So, now it's baked into corporate culture.~
Update: See reply below. Courts have upheld that corporations have no requirement to seek profits over all else.
That's actually not the case.
"courts have consistently refused to hold directors liable for failing to maximise shareholder value"
"In 2014, the United States Supreme Court voiced its position in no uncertain terms. In Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., the Supreme Court stated that “Modern corporate law does not require for profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else”. "
Just more corporate propaganda, that's all.
https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
Holy shit! That's good to know. Thank you.
The entity is the civil court system, and while there is no law written "no company can work in a way that doesn't maximize profit", upon taking investment, it's typical that companies, the fiduciary, come under the expectation that they'll be working for the sake of their beneficiary's interests. In public companies, this interest is clear-cut. Investors want dividends and to see the value of the company increase. This is typically done through maximizing of profits.
So while it's not explicit that they must forever maximize profits, companies can be successfully sued for not doing so.
Learn more:
Companies have also been sued for not maximizing profits and won the case. "Best interests" can mean a lot of things. It can mean short term profit for one shareholder, long term profit for another, and stable, guaranteed profit for a third.
Then stop calling it a law.
Nobody called it a law. It's a legal responsibility, and it is law, but it is not "a" law.
It's frustrating but very much a real thing. You might google "fiduciary duty to shareholders." Basically, once a company is public, the board has to act in the best interests of the shareholders (which means maximizing returns and/or shareprice.)
This is terrible for the world but pretending it doesn't exist doesn't help.
That's not true. Courts have specifically ruled that maximizing returns is NOT required. The companies do have to consider the best interests of the shareholders, but that does not strictly mean maximizing profits:
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits
I would re-read that article a bit more closely. The point they're making is that recently there have been developments such that maximizing profits is not seen as the SOLE principle behind decision making above all else.
For example, they cite Hobby Lobby which has Christian practices that doubtless cut into profits but are allowed as part of the company's mission.
But my apologies, a more accurate phrasing would've been duty to shareholders and the company.
Still, unless Apple has a really interesting company charter, annoying a capricious manufacturer of almost everything the company needs that is ALSO one of the world's largest markets, well, not that tough a multi billion dollar decision.
Duty ≠ law
Duty is a legal concept, silly Billy.
You can commit a crime by violating a duty. A common one of which you've probably heard is "duty of care" I.e., a doctor can be charged with a crime by not fulfilling their duty of care to a patient.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/personal-injury/breach-of-duty/
I almost want to look up confidently incorrect. Just maybe learn from this and try googling when you are unfamiliar with a term, you look less silly!
Show me what law enforcers a company to profit.
You're getting confused or you might not actually understand how companies work, so I'll break it down.
There is no law forcing a company to profit. (Though Companies are generally formed for that purpose.) A private organization could do whatever it wants within legal bounds. (This is how non profits, charitable foundations etc exist.)
But, what happens next is many companies go "public" by selling shares. In essence, they put a percentage of themselves on the market and people by shares in that company, such that they, legally speaking, own a tiny percentage of that company. Part of that purchase is that the company now has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. As noted before, a duty is a legal concept like assault, negligence etc. And I explained fiduciary duty earlier, you can look through.
Here is kind of a classic example of a company losing a case because its directors breached their fiduciary duty to minority shareholders:
https://casetext.com/case/ebay-domestic-holdings-v-newmark
Thank you. We’re done now.
lol I'm almost impressed by the brute force of your refusal to comprehend.
It's uhhh, impressive.
By your logic/refusal to understand how simple things work, a doctor has no duty to help you, no company is at fault if its products harm you and a lawyer can do whatever they want to maximize their own profit.
Show me the “legal responsibility to maximize profits” in the law books and the police codes used to enforce said laws or STFU.
You know what? Nevermind.
You mean like I already did?
Why do you think people buy shares? Just fans of three digits and numbers that change?
Edit: Italicized the relevant section to make things easier for you.
Apple is a lifestyle company. The hardware is just the base layer.
Meanwhile every major cloud provider is investing in designing and deploying their own ARM silicon. I’ve benchmarked graviton and T2A, the cost per performance is great and only going to get better.
Performance per watt is a CPU metric I've never seen anyone use before lol
It's wild what Apple marketing comes up with
Yes, measuring the consumption of electricity for a given performance benchmark is totally irrelevant to datacenter providers, who get their electricity for free from the electricity fairy, and thus can harvest pure profit without operational costs.
It is also totally irrelevant for portable devices, because batteries last forever, and every smart phone has a huge fan inside to dump all the heat waste via dual XTREME exhausts.
It was clarified that Apple devices are fine in government. Teslas ban would be a better example
Nah, Apple is an ad aggregation company same as Google. They use hardware and software to lock users into their products so they can show them ads and collect their data to make the ads more targeted. In return ad companies pay them to serve ads to their users. That's how they make money.
The fuck you smoking. 80% of sales are hardware and 20% is services, ie music, tv, and their cut of App Store sales
Ad revenue from running ads on the app store, their news app , podcast app, etc.
I didn't claim they were making most of their money that way, but that's absolutely the business model they've been shifting to for the last decade as their hardware sales decrease pretty much quarterly, especially their phone sales.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/strong-ad-sales-stable-enterprise-spending-wind-beneath-big-tech-earnings-2023-10-23/