Well, I’m not going to assume that every decision made by the senior decision-makers in a company is rational for the firm or for ‘maximizing shareholder wealth’ in the long term.
CEOs and executives may act in their own, or their firm’s short term interests, they can however also get complex decisions entirely wrong. Not to mention tax law can incentivize some sub rational behaviour.
There are enough historical cases of absolutely bad thinking running companies into the ground, with deceptive practices that leave lenders and subcontractors short.
The stock market’s reaction to act against bad management can be tardy.
(I’m setting aside corporations taking responsibility for larger societal benefits here because US SEC norms for publicly traded corporations don’t provide for that the way they are in Canadian or European law. In the other hand, there may be some arguments that some of these actions are anticompetitive, and worthy of antitrust investigation.)