> The moment a company goes public they're legally required to make stupid, short-term decisions that are worse for everyone

Nope there's no legal requirement. Management is happy for you to believe there is because they get paid in stock.

The only legal requirement is to make decisions that are in the shareholders' interests, rather than the management's. That means short-term-bad, long-term-good decisions are actually strongly encouraged.

The fact that companies are organized the way they are today is not some fact of natural law. There are legal structures of ownership that have been put in place by real people, which means there are the means to completely change those ownership structures.

Allowing outside shareholders in combination with private ownership is going to result in the kinds of short term thinking that lead to the "exits" and other profit-maximizing behaviors.

One "way out" is to make laws that give good public incentives / allow people to easily incorporate as organizations where the employees are the sole owners of the entity (co-op).

> The moment a company goes public they're legally required to make stupid, short-term decisions that are worse for everyone

FWIW this is a myth.

There needs to be regulation that discourages the behavior. Some ideas that have been floated include expanding corporate responsibility to include the workers and customers, loosening corporate responsibility laws so that companies don't have strong obligation to its shareholders, ending quarterly earning reports, reviving the ban on stock buybacks, etc.

No, because shareholders are the owners of the company. The legal requirement is more a fail safe than a mandate, because obviously the company wants to act in the best interest of the company. Without the legal mandate these companies would still almost universally act the same.

There are laws that a plumber can't come into your home and smash up your pipes. That law however is not the thing that prevents the plumber from doing that, the plumber naturally works in your common interest. It's the exact same with companies, shareholders elect a board who hires specialists to run the company. Notice the shareholders are at the top.

"Shareholder value" is just another way of saying return on capital. Do you want to reduce return on capital? (the answer could be yes or no, just advancing the discussion)

Or do you want to redistribute the ownership of capital?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Stock_Exchange perhaps

> Is there any way out of this "shareholder value" hell? The moment a company goes public they're legally required to make stupid, short-term decisions that are worse for everyone, even the shareholders?

Shareholder value (primacy) is one interpretation on the purpose of companies (and a relatively recent one):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

There are others:

* “Profits are to business as breathing is to life. Breathing is essential to life, but is not the purpose for living. Similarly, profits are essential for the existence of the corporation, but they are not the reason for its existence.” ― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._O%27Reilly_III

* “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”[72] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Politics

If you back to the mid-1900s US:

> In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”

* https://law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-history...

Or further:

> American corporate law has long drawn a bright line between for-profit and non-profit corporations. In recent years, hybrid or social enterprises have increasingly put this bright-line distinction to the test. This Article asks what we can learn about the purpose of the American business corporation by examining its history and development in the United States in its formative period from roughly 1780-1860. This brief history of corporate purpose suggests that the duty to maximize profits in the for-profit corporation is a relatively recent development. Historically, the American business corporation grew out of an earlier form of corporation that was neither for-profit nor nonprofit in today’s parlance but rather, served a multitude of municipal, religious, charitable, educational, and eventually business purposes in early nineteenth-century New England. The purposes of early American business corporations—rather than maximization of profit to private shareholders— were often overtly public, involving development of local transportation, finance, and other much-needed economic infrastructure. With the rise of factory-based manufacturing, railroads, and other capital-intensive industries in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and the advent of general incorporation statutes, the purpose of the American business corporation shifted fundamentally from public to private. By 1860, the stage was set for the modern firm.

* https://repository.law.umich.edu/mbelr/vol9/iss1/2/

The idea that it is some kind of 'legal requirement' is also a myth:

* https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/771/

This behavior may have started with Dodge v. Ford.

tl;dr Ford wanted to invest profits back into Ford company and Dodge forced them in court to pay dividends instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

> Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than for the benefit of his employees or customers.

> The moment a company goes public they're legally required to make stupid, short-term decisions that are worse for everyone, even the shareholders

The problem is a lot of companies functionally behave that way but there actually isn’t a mandate resembling anything like this, though it’s repeated so often I’m not surprised a lot of people it’s the case. Fiduciary duty doesn’t translate to “rip up and sell everything that isn’t nailed down, burn all your goodwill, and squeeze the shit out of everyone so you can extract every red cent as fast as humanly possible.” You are allowed to plan for the long-term. We just don’t and we create all sorts of incentives (bonus structures for instance) to chase short-term gains.

The investors aren’t going to rise up in all their fury and haul off a CEO to be guillotined because he invested in a project that spans more than a quarter. But unfortunately, plenty of businesses love operating as if that’s the case, because it gives an excuse to make quick dirty money. So they hide behind this erroneous perception of what constitutes “fiduciary duty.“ In the US’s particular form of capitalism it makes a lot of sense, even if it’s terrible for us as a whole.

Utilities have made $200B+ in profit since 2021, new report says - https://www.utilitydive.com/news/utilities-have-made-200b-in... - March 17th, 2026

Paying for Their Profits: How Ratepayers Foot the Bill for Soaring Utility Profits - https://energyandpolicy.org/utility-profit-report/ - March 12th, 2026

- Some utilities consistently operate at significantly higher margins than the average. The top 10 utilities by average margin over 2021–2024 include MidAmerican Energy (27.22%), Florida Power & Light (23.51%), Nantucket Electric (23.24%), Empire District Electric (22.45%), Florida Public Utilities (20.35%), CalPeco (20.28%), Public Service Electric & Gas (19.44%), Duke Energy Carolinas (19.07%), Alabama Power (18.71%), and AEP Texas (18.63%).

In the Georgia (US state, not country) there is one investor owned utility (Georgia Power) that is regulated like you mention by the state. They have to get rates and new plants and basically everything approved by the state Public Service Commission. We'll set aside how the PSC is basically a captured regulatory agency, but in theory they are highly regulated and don't just get to do what they want. GPC serves about little more than half the state's population, and about a quarter of the physical land mass

The rest of the state is served by either local cities with their own utilities or cooperatives. The cooperatives are not government agencies, they are privately owned non-profit corporations whose customers are the owners. These companies aren't regulated by the state PSC and have the ability to set their own rates unilaterally. The only regulation they have is that they report their rates to the PSC, but it's just a report, no approval

Technically they're almost all subject to regulation by the US Government as a condition of taking loans in the 30s/40s (and most of them have rolled that financing over and continue to use it to finance operations even today) but for the most part that regulation just says they have to at least charge enough to cover their interest, and can't sell their systems without the feds' approval

They could raise rates as much as they want, but the structure of a customer-owned company like that is the profits just get redistributed back to the customers, so there's no reason or incentive to do so

And, FWIW, that 23% number from the linked article is about right. GPC is usually 15-20% higher than most of the coops and city-owned systems in Georgia (there are some that are higher). And this is even with some of those coops and cities actually buying power wholesale from GPC

Rate of return issue, and how the current bond market activity and yield curve plays into this, is covered in https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-the-federal-reserve-s...

As interest rates go up, investor owned utilities increase their rate of return on equity ask, pushing up consumer electricity prices. A baseline of consumer electric demand is inelastic, and required for life.

How are roads maintained and upgraded?

"Taxpayers" are the public.

The infrastructure is for the public.

Why shouldn't the public get to pay for its own infrastructure without a middleman trying to make a buck?

Huh? Profits are outside capital improvements. That is the nature of profits. There are arguments for private utilities but this one makes no sense.