You don’t need any court rulings to understand this. The owners of a company decide how it will be run. The shareholders own the company, they elect a board to

You don’t need any court rulings to understand this. The owners of a company decide how it will be run. The shareholders own the company, they elect a board to represent them. The board hires a CEO and defines their compensation package (along with its performance incentives). The decisions of the shareholders and their board may prove to be unwise in retrospect, but this doesn’t change how the governance structure works. The board (and thus the CEO) can only do what the shareholders want them to do. All of the ruminating over short term thinking is also nonsensical. A company that has no future has very little value. Perhaps the share holders, or the board, or their CEO have a long-term vision that you disagree with. But this isn’t anything close to an objective fact, it’s just your own self-aggrandising opinion that if you were running the 4th largest company in the world, that you’d be doing a better job.