> 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.

Lately I’ve been starting to wonder if the world has changed in a way where long term planning doesn’t work anymore. If information and the reaction to it propagates so quickly that the world changes faster than your plans can adapt.

A long term plan for a company is _at least_ a decade. If your plan ended today, it started in 2016 so it has had to survive COVID, inflationary periods, several trade wars, the rise of AI and now the side effects of the war in Iran.

If your long term plan has to adapt to those in real time, is it even a long term plan? Or is it really a series of long term plans cut so short they became short term plans? I can see companies adapting to just drop the long term premise entirely.

Well, partly companies behave that way out of anticipatory obedience: if they were to really focus on the long term at the detriment of short-term profits, you'd bet that at least some (maybe influential) shareholders would protest. And partly of course the CEO's compensation depends on the shareholders being happy, not on the long-term viability of the company, so there's that...