Yeah the statement is definitely false. But I think there is a private vs public company nuance. Matt Levine of Bloomberg looks at this in an interesting way f

Yeah the statement is definitely false. But I think there is a private vs public company nuance. Matt Levine of Bloomberg looks at this in an interesting way for public cos. - "everything is securities fraud", where "everything" is any action that impacts stock price. It seems that there is a lot of evidence that in the US, regulators penalises, not the making/not making of profit, but the movement in stock price. If you make $10bn in profit but kill 100 people and the stock price goes to 0, well thats bad mkay. On the other hand, with private companies, its pretty weird because here they are less regulated over stock price and profit matters far more (unless you are en route to IPO). This results in a tonne of companies that do bad stuff like gouge drug prices etc. One you introduce this nuance, you get things like the "Texas two step", which J&J made popular, again, recently. The idea of a corporate veil has been long established; a "limited" company is a pool of risk and reward that is isolated and non transferable in the most part. So public companies go through a lot of chicanery to get the best of both worlds - high risk profit max in subsidiaries, and corporate governance to share price max, everywhere else.