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.
The article I linked discusses that…even stakeholders that care about profit care about it differently. You have long term investors (think Warren Buffett) and you have short term traders. Long term investors care about sustainable growth (think a company moving into new markets, like 3M) while traders want the CEO to pump prices so they can jump ship. There is no such thing as “maximize profits” here. Neither one of these maximize profits. One fucks over long term investors, one messes with traders.