Shareholder Expectations Quotes

We have to raise the bar on corporate governance. Shareholders want ethical behavior and honesty.

This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.

I don't want to take a company public and not have it do extremely well and fail the public shareholder.

Our people, our shareholders, me, Bill Gates, we expect to change the world in every way, to succeed wildly at everything we touch, to have the broadest impact of any company in the world.

People ought to invest in us because they like our company and the way they run it. We still do quarterly earnings guidance, but we tell people openly that they ought to look at the company for the long term and that's how they ought to invest.

ESG is a pernicious strategy, because it allows the left to accomplish what it could never hope to achieve at the ballot box or through competition in the free market. ESG empowers an unelected cabal of bureaucrats, regulators and activist investors to rate companies based on their adherence to left-wing values. Like the social credit scores issued by the Chinese Communist Party, a low ESG score can be devastating, making it virtually impossible for a company to raise capital—and that is exactly the point.

Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.

When you face the shareholders, then you can feel the heat is on you. For 20 years I got to answer to my shareholders. It's not easy.

I'm a spreadsheet guy. But you get to that moment of truth, and it has nothing to do with a spreadsheet. You've got to factor in what your competitors are doing, what the technology is doing, what your shareholders want, what your employees want, what your customers want, and you've got to make it happen sometimes.