> Companies are entities for making money for investors and employees and maybe having fun doing it.

Not necessarily. Companies are entities composed of people for some purpose or another. If a company is privately owned, while profit is probably in there somewhere, the actual goal is up to the owners. Maybe the owners want to make the game they always dreamed of, and prioritise that over extra profit.

Shouldn't they? The world would probably be a nicer place if companies had goals other than profit. The fact that this is how companies currently operate has no bearing on how they should operate.

Corporations have charters, and historically a lot of jurisdictions placed a whole lot of limitations on corporate charters, ranging from time limiting them, to holding the corporations to their charter - that is, limiting them to do what they were chartered to do. It has not always been a given that you would just get a charter, because a corporate charter imbues a corporation with rights that affects society that only exists by society deciding to honour them.

So this idea of making demands of corporations to have charters that maintains some balance of public benefit is not at all new (that is not to say that a corporation that primarily focuses on making profit does not provide some benefit, but it's not some sort of automatic given that is enough).

There's a whole movement around the idea of pushing governments to revoke corporate charters that do not benefit the public beyond the immediate economic effects (effectively dismantling the corporations in question). You don't need to agree with them, but it's worth realising that the history of the modern, purely profit-seeking corporation with expansive rights is not a very long one, and not at all the only model of how to deal with corporations.

> This person is kinda suggesting that companies should have some noble higher purpose.

Not necessarily. There's nothing inherently wrong with making money. What's wrong is never being satisfied no matter how much money you make. "Growth, where it no longer serves a purpose beyond the accumulation of more growth", "endless growth", "growth unchecked". The author doesn't say that growth itself is bad. If you're a sole proprietor, it's not necessarily bad to grow and hire employees. The question is, at what point do you stop prioritizing growth and start prioritizing other things in life — happiness, love, friendship, leisure, ethics, the environment, etc. At some point there are diminishing returns to accumulating more wealth, but there's a collective insanity that says no accumulation is too much. Society celebrates the ultra-wealthy, but to me the ultra-wealthy seem more like gluttons. Would you celebrate someone who eats constantly and weighs 500 pounds? That's not healthy.

Look at Warren Buffett. Dude doesn't even know what to do with all of his money. He only knows how to accumulate, he knows nothing else. He's pledged to give away most of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation... which means he's delegating the spending of his wealth to someone else... after his death! Buffett literally has no idea how to spend the wealth he has accumulated. Doesn't that seem bizarre to you? Why does he keep accumulating?

Some people will claim that if you don't constantly strive for growth, then you're "complacent" and "lazy". But that's completely false, because financial wealth is only one aspect of life. If you only strive for financial growth, then you are one-dimensional; you're lazy and complacent about the non-financial aspects of your life.

Companies are there to make money to shareholders. Still I see huge difference in paying dividends and having growth in tune of general economy and massive VC funded growth with end goal of pawning it all of to someone else or being last player on the market and hiking prices up. The later one might not ever actually be net positive.