> Now, once the "business and purpose" of the company is defined to be profit for the shareholders the company has fiduciary duty to perform in the "best intere

> Now, once the "business and purpose" of the company is defined to be profit for the shareholders the company has fiduciary duty to perform in the "best interest" of the company and its shareholders as defined by this mission statement. Absolutely not. Here are the fiduciary duties of corporate management: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fiduciary-responsibility-corporations.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fiduciary-responsibi... The closest that comes to your assertion is the "Fiduciary Duty of Loyalty" and that states managers must put the best interests of the corporation (note, not just the shareholders) above their own. In general, the management of corporations in the US has significant leeway (from a legal standpoint) in deciding how best to run their corporation. If the board doesn't like the choices upper management is making, their recourse is to fire upper management. Furthermore, the standard you are asserting is legally ludicrous. Not every shareholder has the same "best interest". There is no litigable standard of "best", thus no way of holding executives legally responsible for actions they didn't take. Additionally, such a standard would open up people to civil consequences merely for being bad at their job. > "In a famous 1970 article in The New York Times Magazine, Milton Friedman wrote that the “great virtue” of the shareholder wealth maximization norm is that “it forces people to be responsible for their own actions and makes it difficult for them to ‘exploit’ other people for either selfish or unselfish purposes.”" (https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...) That was Friedman's opinion. It was never substantiated by any statute or case law.