Its not that shareholders dont care, its that ownership isnt concentrated enough in a shareholder that both cares and is competent. I wrote my undergrad econome

Its not that shareholders dont care, its that ownership isnt concentrated enough in a shareholder that both cares and is competent. I wrote my undergrad econometrics paper on this, it was actually pretty interesting. You inevitably end up with board capture and short term focus unless there is an elon or group of elons with enough shareholder votes to threaten management because uninvolved shareholders tend to listen to the managent and management wants to capture the board so they can vote themselves higher comp which relies on short term performance for the payout, which is much larger for the ceo than longterm returns on existing comp holdings. It has likey gotten much worse since passive blackrock et al etfs gained such large market share because they vote the shares in ways that benefits them which is only loosely correlated with beneffitting the ultimate share owner.