What scares the f*ck out of you?

[Undertoad]

Which we could return to. I think what you've done here, in a wild tangent from the original point, is to confuse the purpose of a Corporation with the purpose of a business.

The purpose of a Corporation is is often written about and considered in business classes and economics and market philsophy. It's to serve the interests of the shareholders, which means to increase the value of their shares.

(Which is, roughly, the perceived value of investment in the corporation, in the marketplace of investments.)

(Note that a Corporation will often do that without making a profit; witness Amazon, whose value continues to increase year over year even while strategically not generating a profit.)

The purpose of a business is much different; it's to serve the interest of the owner or owners. They will have wildly varying reasons why they want to operate a business. For many of them, strategically losing money is a reason to do so, either for tax purposes, or accounting purposes, market reasons ("That site in Elmwood is losing money but it's a pain in the ass for our competition the next town over"), family reasons ("The pretzel shop goes to our daughter-in-law. We expect she will fuck it up"), or personal reasons ("I'm not making any money with my Christian cake store, but it's a personally fulfilling mission.")

That's what you wanted to say in the first place. If increasing the price of the stock making money is the only purpose of the business, denying a portion of the market is a terrible way to go about it. Identifying buyers and not alienating them is kind of critical. You'd only want to do that if some purpose of your business is not making money in certain ways. Which is perfectly fine.