No, being a public compony the CEO is legally obligated to chase profits
Comment on Raspberry Pi is now a public company
mspencer712@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?
ryannathans@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
wurosh@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
No, shareholder interest, which - in the absence of the clear desire of the majority shareholder(s) - is assumed to be profit. So I think the question above is quite important actually
ryannathans@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
That is a fair point
megopie@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
This is a common misconception based on an argument put forward my Milton Friedman. It’s based on legal cases where CEOs were taken to court for knowingly defrauding shareholders for their own personal gain (say, selling all of a companies assets of the company to a different company the ceo owns privately for a single dollar).
Friedman argued that these cases set precedent that meant all CEO were legally obligated to maximize shareholder value and could be held legally accountable for not doing so. Friedman was wrong about this, like many other things he said, as he was not a lawyer, nor a particularly good economist. No CEO has even been successfully sued for “failing to maximize shareholder value” despite some people taking Friedman’s work to heart and trying to do so.
off_brand_@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
It comes from the case against Henry Ford after he saw his company was making gobs of cash and decided to give some of that to his employees. Shareholders successfully sued him to stop this on the grounds that he has a fiduciary duty to shareholders.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
As with anything legal, there is nuance, but the basic assertion that there is fiduciary duty to shareholders is not wrong.
megopie@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
He was sued for miss use of company profits, not for failing to maximize profits.
He took profits and payed outside the normal pay structure. This is not a case of him failing to maximize shareholder value or maximize profits, but failure to pay dividends with money that should have gone in to them.
ryannathans@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
I guess it depends on what jurisdiction you’re in huh
palitu@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
The article said that they are the major shareholder.
Midnitte@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
I assume OpenAI sort of demonstrates the fragility of that arrangement…