I wish all companies would just state the obvious and list the first principle as "Make Money".

Perhaps it should go without saying, but sometime around the 90s or so, many companies tried to pretend that they had these lofty, societal goals, and they tried to pretend that making money was almost secondary.

The reason I think it's important to list "make money" as the first, primary goal is that it makes it clear that all other goals are subservient to that one. The thing that makes my eyes roll about principles and mission statements is I've seen them all promptly thrown out the window when a company's money making machine is threatened. Essentially, they're principles when they're aligned with making money, but if circumstances change in the slightest, the principles will be jettisoned if they make it harder to make money (which kind of makes it hard to call them "principles" in the first place - maybe "guidelines" would be a better term?)

Yeah, I had a few months inside Facebook, and saw this in action on the internal FB. People would raise objections to unethical actions by the company, and the response was basically "Yeah, but it makes soooo much money."