[hnthrowaway121]

But surely it’s debatable whether increased short term revenue benefiting shareholders this year is better or worse than longer term plays with the chance of higher returns later, or that avoiding some sources of revenue for ethical reasons protects the brand’s reputation and image in the market.

[fluoridation]

If a decision puts at odds the interests of two different sets of shareholders at two different points in time, why should the interests of the more distant one be given priority over those of the current one?

[cedilla]

There's no reason to speculate about who the future shareholder will be, nor is there any good reason to just assume that favouring short-term gains will favour the current shareholders more. It's also unknown if a shareholder would prefer long-, mid- or short term gains.

Favouring short term gains over anything else is obviously wrong – Amazon could sell AWS for 5 billion dollars tomorrow, but I don't think you'd argue that this would be in their interest at all, even though it's just giving priority to current shareholders over more distant ones.

[bee_rider]

The current stakeholders probably have an interest in the company not going out of business long term as well.

Anyway, what’s the level of evidence required to sue somebody for working against the interest of their shareholder? I’d expect it to be something along the lines of: the CEO knowingly and maliciously worked against their interest… I mean, we can’t have made being bad at your job illegal, right?

The market is pretty clever, so there is at least room to believe that any move that plausibly would help long-term company health should also help short-term stock prices, right?

[lesuorac]

Why are they different shareholders?

Trivially, the company can expect that it's current shareholders will hold the stock for a long time and so there's no reason to "juice" the current price at the cost of future price.

But also simply, making long term plans is easily arguable to be in fiduciary duty as a future shareholder would be willing to pay more to the current shareholder for a company in good health.