Do they not have a fiduciary responsibility to their public shareholders now that they did not before?
If a random company with a very different mission (say, Intel) comes along and offers to purchase the company at a decent share price premium they pretty much have to take it, right?
I never get why people think this does exist. If it did, wouldn’t every company be obliged to get out of the business they’re in and start doing what would be most profitable right now? Obviously that would be absurd.
Just as an interesting tidbit while we here are talking about UK companies it doesn't even exist in the US. The SCOTUS said so:
> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so.
Everyone repeating the mantra about how caring for shareholder profits is the fiduciary duty of the corporation leadership, and how it's "a law".
At this point it's a self-propagating meme. I frequently encounter people, learned people, who act like it is a law or moral principle (in fact, corporations aren't even required to be for profit even when operating commercially, they are just an organizational structure). When questioned, nobody can cleanly point where they learnt it, but actual check shows that Friedman Doctrine[1] was never written into law.
Ah - I see. I don't think that's marketing; just a common misconception. But yes, I've seen that too. No idea if it's true or not. Presumably it changes depending on the country.
That said, the misconception can be tracked down to one person in 1980... that sounds more like an idea that got marketed - whether by Friedman teaching in university in certain way, or his students continuing that, or people taking the idea from his paper and teaching that... or newspapers passing it further...
If a random company with a very different mission (say, Intel) comes along and offers to purchase the company at a decent share price premium they pretty much have to take it, right?