This stuff tends to be very complex. Writing off losses early doesn’t always help you. This is why depreciation rules are flexible and losses can be carried for

This stuff tends to be very complex. Writing off losses early doesn’t always help you. This is why depreciation rules are flexible and losses can be carried forwards. For a public company with steady growth I imagine you generally want to amortize losses over a fairly long window. Also if you already had losses this year, and think you’ll grow more in future years, you really don’t want to book more losses now! Hertz has been getting hammered recently. Especially problematic if these are lumpy losses which will make profits less predictable. You’d rather smooth those out and hit your earnings forecast. (At least, that’s the CFO’s mandate.) It gets even more complex when you consider the interplay with windfalls and rapid growth, but you can probably assume here that they are optimizing for short-to-medium term stock price (1-5 yr). Most CEOs don’t invest in 10yr bets. You might get fired for lackluster growth before that pays off! More generally, “fiduciary duties” is generally construed pretty loosely. Delaware corporate law defers quite strongly to the corporation; if they can make a coherent argument for why they are benefitting shareholders they tend to get the benefit of the doubt.