>Large short term profits can be made if costs are cut.

What else can a "businessperson" do if they don't have the acumen to build up corporate value at all compared to those who came before and laid the foundations to begin with?

The purpose of the stock exchange was to make it possible for a diverse bunch of investors to come together and fund the growing needs of a growing country.

IOW the type of shareholders that this was designed to be suitable for are those who are actually investing in the registered corporations so those corporations can level up to accomodate unmet demand and grow capabilities to reach a more prosperous stability, thereby providing a fair but lucrative return for the investors over time. As the corporations grow in value so do the shares, naturally.

OTOH once the market has been established, and especially in case it grows faster than the underlying value for a long enough period of time (like longer than one human lifetime, or longer than a single business career[0]), then a sizable amount of "investment" capital can end up manipulating the system to extract established value through their trading[1]. Especially when it comes to things like voting shares and mergers & acquisitions. Probably the longer a corporation has been publicly traded can figure prominently since that can be a corporation living longer than a human lifetime too.

So rather than investing value beneficially, you end up with large chunks of capital actively working to extract value parasitically[2], which is like a double-whammy, and eventually the stock exchange and the market it spawned are not working as intended at all.

Maybe just the opposite.

IOOW with Boeing the value was lost a long time ago with an unfavorable merger, and every stakeholder has been doing without ever since. It's just becoming unbearably impossible to ignore any more.

It just so happens that with an aircraft company, it's not only the shareholders, employees, and customers of Boeing who make up the majority of stakeholders. The flying public (who pays for it all to begin with) participates in far greater numbers and depends on the product aircraft with more of a life-or-death risk factor than the stakeholders who are on the financial receiving end.

And it all comes down to integrity.

Some business operators are still traditionally astute enough to create value where everyone financially involved gets their money's worth.

Others never will be able to accomplish this, and lots of them know who they are from the beginning and have had a lifetime focusing their efforts on ways not to give people their money's worth. Sometimes with the most insidious strategies.

And that's merely from poor integrity, even when ethics are not fully compromised.

Now look what happens when the ethics go out the window too . . .

Well that whooshed by and most people never saw it coming.

[0] where some may rake it in and retire early from a relatively short career.

[1] often including long-ago established value or utility that is now irreplaceable economically or legally.

[2] from anything smaller or less powerful in their path, with who knows what kind of motivation not aligned with the growing needs of a growing mother country.