A lot of the most egregious, society-warping behavior by monstrous-sized companies is due to paying execs with stock. It was a salary tax avoidance maneuver that started in the 80's, and has led to 1) absolute fixation on short-term stock price, and 2) (also to that end) stock buybacks. Many of our largest corporations have used recent stimulus moneys to fund buybacks like it was sex or something. All it has been is a transfer of tax dollars to the oligarchy, and has "stimulated" nothing. We need some laws that do away with the loophole somehow, either by not allowing companies to pay people in stock, or by taxing the stock on its nominal value when given, making it much less attractive as a shell game.

Nature solved it for us: obsolete things die and are replaced by better, new things. Google dying is not a bad thing, it's how it's supposed to work. Same for countries, religions, and so on. On a different scale.

That's the neat part, you don't.

The problem, ultimately, cannot be solved without disassembling neoliberal capitalism. It is more or less endemic to the system. To a large extent that short termist, get returns and move on before the cost is due, mode of being is how we managed to run an economy that requires constant growth (rather than stability) to function. It's also why we won't solve any of our climate or many social issues.

There's no way to change this without drastically restructuring the utility function people apply to decisions, and that just won't happen until the aftermath of whatever collapse is inevitably going to happen when the planet floods.

Private ownership of businesses, so long term consequences fall on someone with the authority to steer them right.

Short term rewards would need to be less enticing than the long term ones. Doing so would involve restricting many rights and privileges and people would hate that.

This is essentially what corruption is. Fixing corruption is extremely hard, especially when it is less overt like this. The main thing you can do is to teach people how to spot bad apples and push them out, fire them or in other ways punish them and reduce the damage they can do. It shouldn't be culturally acceptable to be a bad apple, but that requires a cultural change and those are really hard to do.

You have to align the long term growth and wellbeing of the company with the long term prosperity of the employee. This is why stock options with a long term vesting period have become an attractive choice.

build better systems.

Easier said than done, but the basic idea would be something like what the Founding Fathers of the US did with the Constitution - make a system where incentives are set up in such a way as to align success for the individual and the group.

If you start a company, you can experiment with alternatives to the current "increase da KPI" style of organization that is so prevalent nowadays.

I think Steve Jobs was a good example of someone who governed by pointing people to a beautiful vision, rather than mindless "ya, numbers go up" type thinking prevalent amongst investors nowadays.

Family owned/controlled businesses think in terms of "what will the next generation inherit?"

It's the alignment problem, but for people.

or in the bull market. techies are greedy

Corporations are meant to improve our lives sustainably. If all these people can do is extract short term value for themselves instead of providing long term value to the world, then there's no reason to allow this corrupt system to continue. It's pretty screwed up that executives can go around chasing infinite short term growth and awarding themselves golden parachutes so they can jump ship when the problems inevitably start to surface. How much destruction can they cause before society stops them?

Because as an executive officer of a company, I am supposed to have the shareholder's interests as my main priority.

I totally get your point, and I understand the "me first!" attitude that it comes from. But we can't have nice things if everyone does this.