That's valid, but the Buzzfeed executives carry much of the blame, not shareholders. There are a number of successful private companies, e.g. Wolfram Research,

That's valid, but the Buzzfeed executives carry much of the blame, not shareholders. There are a number of successful private companies, e.g. Wolfram Research, Huawei, Trader Joe's, Deloitte. It's quite evident that Buzzfeed went public not to finance their news business, but to seemingly cash out. After all, it's now nothing more than a $700M list builder.