Comment by the_bear
7 hours ago
Companies can prioritize things other that money if the shareholders all agree. The more shareholders a company has, the harder it is for them all to agree on anything aside from "we want more money". Family-owned business often (but not always) have a small number of shareholders, so it's easier for them to have shared values.
For example, my brother and I co-own a smallish (~$5 million/year revenue) software business. We do care about money to some extent, but we regularly agree to do things that work against shareholder value because we also care about things other than money. With two people, it's easy for our values to be aligned on those other things.
With dozens or more shareholders, that's basically impossible. A publicly traded company couldn't realistically be like "hey shareholders, can we agree that we care a lot about this niche local political issue in the town the company was founded?" The more shareholders you have, the more the only commonality between them is "we want more money".
There are many family-owned businesses that are only in it for the money, but "family-owned" can be a proxy for "not very many shareholders" which at least opens the door for the company to have non-financial priorities.
The existence of "socially conscious" investment funds says that there are investors out there who do value things other than total return. It is a myth that "shareholder value" must only be defined in terms of money. Brand reputation, goodwill, etc. can all be considered. It just happens that money is the overriding concern most of the time.
Sure, if you gather the investors from the start to have a unifying theme other than money, that's fine. But it's very difficult to take a random company with a bunch of unrelated shareholders and convince them all to care about the same thing.
Even the things you named (brand reputation, goodwill, etc.) are prioritized by companies because they're upstream of shareholder value. Many companies have a float in the Pride parade, an employee volunteer day and post on social media about how they're reducing their carbon footprint. Most of those companies are doing those things because they believe they ultimately increase shareholder value, not because shareholders have decided to sacrifice money because they care more about other things.