He really doesn't. Look at the consequences to him for wasting tens of billions on his "metaverse" fantasy, for example. Let me know if you find anything.
But even if he did, that doesn't require that he ignore negative externalities. Facebook has a Net Promoter Score similar to what health insurance companies and monopoly utilities do. Zuckerberg himself is disliked by 2/3rds of humanity. That's not good for long-term shareholder value.
Something else that's bad for long-term stock values? Profiting from slowly destroying the health of the societies in which all your customers live.
> Zuckerberg has a fiduciary responsibility to optimize shareholder value
“Shareholder value” is ambiguous for good reason. It defers to the Board’s judgement. Fiduciary responsibility doesn’t excuse this sort of incentivizing of crime.
> Zuckerberg has a fiduciary responsibility to optimize shareholder value
Is that true?
And if it is true, he controls 60% of the voting power because he owns class B shares that get 10 votes each. Do you think he will sue himself if he fails to wring every last dollar out of Meta?
No, the OP is repeating a common misconception. Corporate law sets out a number of fiduciary duties, including to act in the best interest of the shareholders but “maximising shareholder value” is not one of them.
The idea that companies should “maximise shareholder value” is a key ideal of some political/economic ideologies (especially what people describe as ‘neoliberalism’) but it’s not law.
I think it's just something that Jack Welch at GE said so many times while making so much money that people started to believe it / wanted it to be true. I'd be happy to hear other stories about why this nonsense arose.
That's a serious oversimplification. A CEO doesn't have any duty to maximize profit at all costs. "Shareholder value" includes quite a lot of things that aren't directly about that at all. Often, the way to optimize shareholder value is to pass on certain practices that may be technically profitable.
Fiduciary duty only means acting in the interest of those providing you with money. If they demand sanity that can become the guiding goal instead of money. Never going to happen in the money first, I want more society we live in but there is no reason it can't. See some activist shareholders demanding change to boards to ensure certain outcomes not related to money.
I quote myself 2 years ago, forgive me if I’m stating the obvious:
I'm going to set up two axioms to arrive at an extrapolated conclusion.
One: Human psychology tends to ascribe more weight to negative things than positive things in the short term. In the long term this generally balances out, but in the short term it's more prudent in a biological sense to pay attention to the rustling in the bushes than the berries you might pick from them. This is known as the [negativity bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias).
Two: The modern gatekeepers of social interaction, Big Tech, employ blind algorithms that attempt to steer your attention towards spending more time on their platforms. These companies are the arbiters of the content we experience daily and what you do and don't see is mostly at their discretion. The techniques they employ, in simple terms, are designed to provoke what they call 'engagement'. They do this because at the end of the day FAANG have not only a financial interest, but a fiduciary duty to sell advertisements at the behest of their shareholders. The more they can engage you, the more ads they can sell. They employ live A-B testing, divide people into cohorts and poke and prod them with psychological techniques to try and glue your eyeballs to their ads.
Extrapolated conclusion:
These companies have a financial and legally binding interest to divide the population against itself, obstructing politics and social interaction to the point where we might not be able to achieve any of the goals that we need to reach to prevent oblivion.
and a moral responsibility to do otherwise. Or, well---whether or not you agree that it is the case in some cosmic sense, it is still how we get to judge him.
Ironically he seems to be very sensitive to this judgment. You would think he would also take action on the basis of it, but so far, seemingly not?
Right? If the press and commentariat is to be believed, these companies are run by genius titans who can do anything, anything at all. Except something good for the societies they and their shareholders live in and profit from. That would be a violation of the gospel of St Ayn, and therefore unthinkable.
