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.
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.
Shareholders know where the money is but it's not where you think it is. People should have learned that already, after watching what happened to the big web platforms.