No one should expect Bezos to speak for all companies in -Amazon's- letter to the shareholder. The problem with the stock market is that it is optimizing for a

No one should expect Bezos to speak for all companies in -Amazon's- letter to the shareholder. The problem with the stock market is that it is optimizing for a different thing than most companies, and even society at large. If the minimum holding period for an asset was, say, 20 years, the subprime mortgage crash would have been much less likely. (One could make a similar argument for democratic office. But I digress.) Shareholder value theory induces a sort of hysterical myopia, where ideas and results are evaluated in these Q2Q or Y2Y window. Growth is only evaluated within the context of the company, which creates perverse incentives wrt externalizing costs. Furthermore, if growth initiatives require no additional external funding, then the public stock market -really- makes no sense, and that is likely the case for Blizzard and Dell. Getting away from shareholder value theory's myopia is the surest way to begin a sustainable recovery of our capital markets.