Their entire “PBC” governance structure was designed from the beginning so that they could entirely avoid accountability to shareholders. Their board answers to no one.
I suspect when the company eventually falls prey to the intractable economic forces they’re up against (Google, OAI, Deepseek, commercial real estate, power) and the company goes bankrupt and gets stripped for parts because all inputs are commodities and capital becomes the only limiting factor, we’ll see regulation that prevents this PBC scam from ever being pulled again on public markets.
It’s a good thing that companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. It’s such a lesswrong/autistic trope to invent these kinds of complicated tricks to work around realities they don’t like, and when pension funds and everyday Americans start bagholding their junk debt and are forced to bail them out, they’re going to face unimaginable blowback.
The real problem is everyday Americans invest in big managed funds where they can't just say "I don't want AI stocks please leave them out my portfolio". Or index funds where even the managers don't get that choice. We need a hybrid model where you as a retail investor leave the day to day decisions to an expert but you can always override them if you want to.
Fiduciary duty forces companies to maximize profit and that's not a good thing. Every dollar paid out to shareholders is both a dollar not invested in growing the economy through more production and a transfer from the working class to capital. It also forces lower product quality, layoffs and anti competitive actions.
We need more companies that choose to not go down that path. They should just put workers and customers first instead of their weird "ethical" principles and cult like beliefs.