Remember that these bigcos have tens of thousands of salaried employees, and those employees all get stock options. A bigco CEO might no longer be motivated by

Remember that these bigcos have tens of thousands of salaried employees, and those employees all get stock options. A bigco CEO might no longer be motivated by personal gain, nor by public reputation; but rather, by private reputation, within their own company, among their employees. After all, their employees — especially the executives — are the group of people a CEO is surrounded by every working day. So, assuming they're neither a sociopath nor an Effective Altruist, why wouldn't they feel a strong empathetic desire to "help" the people right in front of them? And presuming they want to help those people, why wouldn't they then conclude that the best, most scalable way they have to do that, is to make sure that those people are all set for life by holding high-value amounts of company stock; and that the most comparative-advantage-y way the CEO has of accomplishing that, is to make the share price go up? Or, to put that another way: a pirate captain doesn't go home once they're personally rich. They made a (perhaps unstated) agreement with their crew: they won't go home until everyone is rich, and they can all comfortably retire. Until then, they'll continue to exploit others for their own gain.