Ok, I'll concede I'm only talking about the vast majority of companies operating in a capitalist system: their broad goal is to make profit. There are companies formed whose explicit (or hidden) aim is not to make profit, to just use the legal frameworks surrounding companies to their advantage, sure (more than there are companies formed for profit-making purposes? But are they then actually companies in anything but name? Is that too reductive, I dunno)
The people working for them may have goals to use that profit in a specific way, but the company is not a person (yes, legally it can pretend to be, but it still isn't).
And a public company is almost universally a vehicle to generate money for investors
It absolutely makes sense as "from" - imagine I go to investors and say "I have this great scheme, and it will make a bunch of money", and they give me a bunch of money, and I pocket it. My company existed to "generate money from investors", for myself.
It's also, obviously, fraud. You can make it less obvious by actually spending the money on a scheme that looks busy and looks like it has potential to generate returns. If I realistically believe that it has the potential to generate the returns I'm promising the investors, then I'm doing the usual thing of trying to generate money for investors. If I'm selling $2 bills for $1, I'll get a lot of customers and build a big business but all the actual value flowing into the system is the cash from the investors and I don't have any real prospect of turning that around.
Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between those.
Ah, but the original context seems to have been a attempted restatement of something you'd said, and "from" wouldn't fit.
I agree it was likely a mistake, but I think much of the talking past each other in the comments following comes from others not realizing that you had made that determination and were responding as if it said "to". People attempting to make money from investors is a pretty common topic around here.
The vast majority of companies in a capitalist system are small to medium sized businesses that are constrained in how much money they can ever make.
Money is an incentive, and there are certainly some companies whose sold purpose is to make profit. As I said these are in the financial sector.
But you only have to look around to see that the vast majority of people who both run companies and who work for them are not in it to maximize profit.
That doesn’t mean they don’t want to succeed against competitors, or that they don’t need profits to survive. Of course they do.
But you simply can’t reduce a company to this.
A common theme on HN and of people in general is people asking how they can make a project profitable. This is indicative that the project is the goal and the profit is merely a necessary condition for achieving it.
A lot of public companies these days don’t give control to the investors. This is also consistent with the company not existing primarily as an investment vehicle.
> ...and the profit is merely a necessary condition for achieving it.
Well, yes, exactly. Say you are a person. You have a goal to make {thing}. You achieve that goal by selling {thing}. To aid in this task under the economic system you live within, you create a legal entity, called a company. Your aim is still to achieve your goal. The aim of the company is to help with that.
The profit is a necessary condition, as you say. I'm not sure how you can write that and then disagree. This is a basic fundamental thing, like 1+1 is 2. If profit is the necessary condition to acheive {goal} and a company is the legal vehicle by which you attempt to achieve {goal}, then the aim of the company has to be increase profit, there isn't a choice.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's just a thing. There will be other primary and ancillary aims, but the core reason for its existence is for that aim.
> But you only have to look around to see that the vast majority of people who both run companies and who work for them are not in it to maximize profit.
Yes, that's what I said re workers, and sure, it can apply to many smaller business owners. As you go up the ladder in company size from small business I would strongly disagree that the people running the companies are not there to maximise profit: appointments are very often explicitly made for financial reasons.
> The vast majority of companies in a capitalist system are small to medium sized businesses that are constrained in how much money they can ever make.
Right, but the ones who are the original subject are not small to medium sized businesses, and they either are not heavily constrained by this, or actively lobby to remove restrictions that do constrain them.
“I'm not sure how you can write that and then disagree.”
Easily - it’s like saying “Consuming food is a necessary condition for human life”. That doesn’t mean all human activity reduces to eating food.
> I would strongly disagree that the people running the companies are not there to maximise profit: appointments are very often explicitly made for financial reasons.
Granted this is sometimes true, but you are just leaving out the fact that in order to increase profit, the business generally has to offer more value too. There are exceptions to this, but it is generally true.
And when they stop adding value or fall behind, unless there is a true monopoly which none of the tech companies have, they become vulnerable to competition.
> > The vast majority of companies in a capitalist system are small to medium sized businesses that are constrained in how much money they can ever make.
> Right, but the ones who are the original subject are not small to medium sized businesses, and they either are not heavily constrained by this, or actively lobby to remove restrictions that do constrain them.
This is just affirming the consequent again, making the assumption that these business all have maximizing profit as their primary goal and that the only reason they haven’t grown giant is constraints.
But the elephant in the room is that if profit were the only motive, nobody would bother to start businesses in fields that aren’t very profitable. The fact that they do, is an existence proof that people run businesses for reasons other than profit maximization.
> Easily - it’s like saying “Consuming food is a necessary condition for human life”. That doesn’t mean all human activity reduces to eating food.
Similarly, if you build a machine to assist humans in consuming food you don't say the point of the machine is something other than assisting them in consuming food.
> But the elephant in the room is that if profit were the only motive, nobody would bother to start businesses in fields that aren’t very profitable. The fact that they do, is an existence proof that people run businesses for reasons other than profit maximization.
Right, but that seems to be missing the point. Which is that the business itself, seperate from the personal goals of the owners and employees, as an entity, has to attempt to maximise profit [because of the economic system it exists within] to enable the goals of the owners and employees. And further to that, if (and I've never said that it isn't an if) that becomes a driving factor, it subsumes the personal goals. For a business to grow to the level talked about, maximising profit has to be the driving force.
Edit:
> This is just affirming the consequent again, making the assumption that these business all have maximizing profit as their primary goal and that the only reason they haven’t grown giant is constraints.
Nono, these businesses are giant. They have grown giant, that's what this was all primarily regarding.
The people working for them may have goals to use that profit in a specific way, but the company is not a person (yes, legally it can pretend to be, but it still isn't).
And a public company is almost universally a vehicle to generate money for investors