Or they can choose not to focus on profit at all. Probably most people with an ownership stake in Valve are fabulously rich now. Maybe they just want to focus on interesting R&D now.

Theoretically there’s a benefit to a publicly traded company that since a lot of your financials are visible to everyone and people get to “vote” by buying and selling shares, there’s a sense in which you can get feedback on how well you’re running the company that you don’t get when it’s private. But, as Reddit’s “wall street bets” and “superstonk” subreddits show, a lot of investors are morons.