Comment by th0raway

The shareholders have little to do with this, ultimately. You see the same rot happen in private companies where the main investor really has full control.

It doesn't take much time seeing companies grow to see the cultural differences take hold when a company goes wrong. You end up with execs and middle management that do not want to rock boats, and where any disagreement is clearly career suicide. At that point, people push for what is good for them and is not good for the company, and people realize that letting things decay is in their best interest. Once your org has enough levels of management, anyone that is part of the big decisions and isn't a team player has already been filtered out, so you see large meetings where hundreds of millions are supposedly distributed, yet not one person is ever going to complain about obvious grift, or decisions that will harm the company in the long run. Open discussion is too dangerous, and coordinating action against bad behavior becomes more and more expensive. Therefore, the company just naturally erodes.

You can get there too with just a bad enough leader that values sycophancy enough... and after enough billions, basically every leader ends up having a lot of trouble accepting news of bad behavior from their advisors.