this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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It‘s laughable to expect corporations to act against their only purpose. As soon as a company sells shares it takes the route of infinite growth which is impossible. First they grow their user base and once they start to inevitably stagnate, they start milking their costumers, shaving off features and laying off workers in order to grow their income. It is really the only way for them to remain existent when the market is saturated. They cannot stay in business when they make billions a year when these billions aren‘t even more billions than last year. You can‘t attract new investors that way and therefore cannot continue to exist. Enshittyfication only just started. It cannot possibly get better when they can‘t expand their user base, only worse. They know they will self destruct eventually, but that doesn‘t matter as long as shareholders get their piece of the cake and jump ship to sink the next one. Just being a massively profitable company is bad business if you‘re not growing. That‘s the state of capitalism we‘re in.
yeah, the stock market makes that a company that is stable and generates a reliable income each year is seen as bad, but a company that has large grow in obviously unsustainable speed, which doesn't have plans on how to ever become profitable is good (i am not specifically taking about netflix here)
Seems like, at a certain point in your growth and success, you could use your billions to buy back stock. That could keep the stock price high, which keeps investors happy. Once you've bought back enough stock, you can effectively go private again, with all of the growth paid for by investors.