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.
Shareholder primacy. Thank you Dodge v Ford. Thank you Friedman Doctrine.
Except that case is not nearly as clear-cut as people pretend it is. Actually a company boss has a ton of flexibility in how they run their company and spend money because nobody knows the future.
But their goals must align with the shareholders; they must extract maximum value. Or at least be able to explain why they think their actions would be in alignment with that goal. All other stakeholders (workers, customers, business partners, the country, the environment) can go fuck themselves if they find themselves on the opposite side of “value.”
Give a corporation the choice between “continue making beaucoup bucks with this new product” vs “don’t poison literally everyone for all foreseeable generations” and guess what, they’ll choose money. Thanks DuPont.