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I think stakeholders, not shareholders, was intentional. Stakeholders (users, advertisers, whatever) might not be well served by a lack of edit button or whatever, but that’s only very tenuously connected to company value.

Shareholders care that they make their pennies of course. That seems to be (part of) the observation.

(Which as you say isn’t earth shattering but still worth remembering when you start wondering “why the heck is this company worth so much?” Because people think so. That’s all.)



>Shareholders care that they make their pennies of course. That seems to be (part of) the observation.

I don't get it. The point of a company is to make money for its shareholders. This has been the case forever now, and certainly isn't caused by "financialised logic". I'd be interested to hear what the "rules of traditional business" (which presumably says that the point of a company isn't to make money for its shareholders?) that OP talked about is.


Here you go;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGbJYk-x1sc

It took me a while to seek to my mental pointer to this.

Wendy Brown is brilliant. But some caveats to try to encourage people to stay with it; The video is long. It's dry and academic. She's a classic leftie. The "business" under discussion is education.

But hidden within this is one of the most cogent explanations of financialised decorrelation of social and monetary values. (Brown's other writing on political science is also brilliant and worth the effort regardless of your actual personal political position.)


> The point of a company is to make money for its shareholders

It is from this premise that your other (mis)understandings arise. Returning to the OP question now, what do we mean by "successful"?




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