A change made through court cases in the mid-century. Basically the result of a neoliberal ideological campaign that first normalized the feduciary duty concept in the business world before forcing it on board rooms through the justice system. Before that, boards of companies could make decisions on ethical grounds and not just fiscal grounds. Today, that precedent has transformed boardrooms into terrifying financial automatons.

Kids these days don’t know about the Microsoft anti-monopoly suit sagas, or how the world felt about Bill Gates before he spent several decades and millions of dollars scrubbing his PR. They’ve always been awful and generally reviled, from the start.

Insert tasteless parody of the “First They Came” poem