Comment by Imustaskforhelp

> publicly traded companies are under no lawful obligation to focus only on making money

You changed the word "purpose" to "obligation"

I think there is a big difference b/w the two.

I would consider a correction in both of these statements, that the only purpose isn't to make money but rather to make valuation (but same thing most of the times)

They'd rather lose on profits or even burn the profits if that would mean that somehow their valuation could grow faster.

But sooner or later the profits will catch up to the evaluation (I hope) and only profitable companies should have their valuations based on top of that in an efficient economy.

Public traded corporations get money from people indirectly via retirement funds or directly via investing in them directly. The whole idea becomes that the profit to a person retiring is not the profits of the company but rather the valuation of the company. Of course, they aren't a legal obligation to profit itself but I would consider them to be almost under legal obligation to valuation otherwise they would be removed out of being publicly traded or in things like S&P 500 etc.

As an example, in my limited knowledge, take Costco, some rich guy would say for them to raise the price of its hotdog etc. from 1.50$ to 3-4$ for insanely more profits. Yet, they have their own philosophy etc. and that philosophy is partially the reason of their valuation as well.

When the rumour that costco is raising the prices of their hot dogs, someone might expect stock prices to increase considering more "profit" in future but rather the stock prices dropped.. by a huge margin if I remember correctly.

most companies are investing into AI simply because its driving their valuations up like crazy.

I don't think its an understatement to say that companies are willing to do anything for their valuations.

Facebook would try to detect if girls are insecure about their body and try to show advertisements to them. This is in my opinion, predatory nature showed by the corporation. For what purpose? for the valuation.