NASA freezes Starliner missions

The shareholders are supposed to fire management when they are being stupid.

It's not that easy with such a big company. Look at Tesla and Musk. A management-aligned board can put a stop to many things the shareholders would like to do.

Since the shareholders elect the board, I guess there might be a lesson for democracy in here too.

I think the problem is that the shareholders do not care about long-term profits either. They keep the management because the management prioritizes the shareholders and not the company or its customers.

We live in the stupid times. After watching others get rich off of Bitcoin, GameStop, and companies with fantastical valuations, everyone wants it to go the Moon ASAP.

Thinking about shareholders in one broad stroke isn't useful.

There are shareholders who care explicitly about long-term (at least 20~30+ years) profits. These are investors who are investing for retirement. The problem here is most of them hold index funds or have the money managed by a third-party, so they are indirect shareholders who may or may not have voting rights themselves and may not care to vote in the first place. Bogleheading is explicitly about not giving a damn, after all.

The shareholders who hold stocks directly may or may not care about long-term profits. Investors holding for retirement do, though whether they would vote is anyone's guess. Traders don't care who or what the stock is, all they care about is whether they turn a profit in the next second. Investors holding for income today (read: dividends) care about short-term profits, though again whether they vote is anyone's guess. Shareholders who hold for biased reasons ("I love <company>!") will probably vote, but whether they care about profits at all is anyone's guess.

Anecdata: I hold Boeing stock (BA) through SWPPX which is an S&P 500 index mutual fund. Most of my interest is returns in about 20 to 30 years' time when I reach retirement age. I do not have voting rights as far as I am aware, and frankly I can't be arsed to care about voting.

Its not that shareholders dont care, its that ownership isnt concentrated enough in a shareholder that both cares and is competent. I wrote my undergrad econometrics paper on this, it was actually pretty interesting. You inevitably end up with board capture and short term focus unless there is an elon or group of elons with enough shareholder votes to threaten management because uninvolved shareholders tend to listen to the managent and management wants to capture the board so they can vote themselves higher comp which relies on short term performance for the payout, which is much larger for the ceo than longterm returns on existing comp holdings. It has likey gotten much worse since passive blackrock et al etfs gained such large market share because they vote the shares in ways that benefits them which is only loosely correlated with beneffitting the ultimate share owner.

Retail is very insignificant holder of this kind of stock. Less than 10-30% total in most cases of S&P stocks. It's mostly the pension funds, and big investors.

If we're talking institutional investors, logic suggests most of their votes would favour intermediate-term policies overall since their various interests encompass the whole breadth of short-, mid-, and long-term.