[globie]

A "Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders" means exactly what I said: "legally bound to extract profit without these silly notions of empathy or trust".

The only notions of empathy or trust you see from publicly traded companies nowadays is the over-engineered calamity of ESG. If you have a single example of a moderately-adopted trend which demonstrates a genuine desire to do right by their society, or to build long-term trust at the expense of short-term profits, I'll readily adopt it into my world model.

[dragonwriter]

> A "Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders" means exactly what I said: "legally bound to extract profit without these silly notions of empathy or trust".

You can define the term that way, but then it doesn't apply to anything that actually exists. Firms do have enforceable legal obligations to their shareholders, but that isn't one of them.

(OTOH, for a widely-held publicly-traded firm, the set of incentives facing management will encourage much the same behvior that that mythical obligation would require, but the mechanism is entirely different.)

[maeil]

That entirely ignores the reality I displayed showing that such a thing does not exist by law in any meaningful way. Yes, the overwhelming majority of publicly held companies behaves this way. No, this is not because they're bound by any kind of law to do so, nor would they be at any legal risk if they were to behave differently.