Public companies are interested in quarterly profits. But for the most part still have longer term goals and don’t purposefully make decisions that will make the company worse off in the long term.

Apple is not going to sell off all of its real estate into separate company, force the other half to rent it and then sell off the rental holdings. Even when it was almost bankrupt it didn’t “shut down the company and give the money back to shareholders”.

The former is a standard PE play. I’ve been part of the “roll up small companies and enshittify them and go public” playbook. I was the lead architect at the parent company designing the software system that integrated the disparate systems of the target companies.

Funny enough I worked for a startup that I loved in 2018-2020 and only left because a job at BigTech fell into my lap. After leaving BigTech in 2023, the company that acquired the startup I worked for (a PE backed acquire and enshittify company) offered me a job as the architect to consolidate their systems based on a referral. I booed out after having a lot of discussions with their internal management and one with a representative from their investor.

It’s hell being under the thumb of a PE companies management (not the internal management) they second guess everything and the level they were hiring me for, I would have dealt with the PE investors representatives directly