Edit: This question attracted way more interest than I hoped for! I will need some time to go through the comments in the next days, thanks for your efforts everyone. One thing I could grasp from the answers already - it seems to be complicated. There is no one fits all answer.
Under capitalism, it seems companies always need to grow bigger. Why can’t they just say, okay, we have 100 employees and produce a nice product for a specific market and that’s fine?
Or is this only a US megacorp thing where they need to grow to satisfy their shareholders?
Let’s ignore that most of the times the small companies get bought by the large ones.
Fiduciary responsibility. If you own a company that has shareholders they can sue you for refusing money or ‘leaving money on the table’, iirc this was a major reason why they sold twitter to musk
And why United Healthcare shareholders sued over losing a tiny bit of money while dealing with the murder of their CEO. People are just people; money is the only driving force in our economy.
Yes Lefty’s should read up more on actual business because there’s a lot of areas they could be making Phenomenal points but instead we just get “eat the rich” over and over again.
Reading theory is for tankies.