zlacker

From what I can see, it's often when the founder loses control of the company (either voluntarily (e.g. retirement) or not) and it falls to the board (representing the shareholders) to appoint the CEO. At that point it's at best a toss up whether they'll appoint someone who actually intends to create value or someone who intends to extract value.

> The obvious next thing we in society should do is abolish public equity as a concept as a customer protection mechanism?

Abolishing public equity is quite drastic, but there are lots of other things we could (and IMO should) be doing to protect society from the negative externalities it causes. For example:

- Mandating worker representation on company boards. So shareholders still have some power, but less.

- Progressive corporation tax (larger companies pay more tax). This would bias the economy towards smaller companies which generally have less problematic externalities.