Whose value is Mallinckrodt maximizing?

Yesterday, a veritable Davos's worth of CEOs signed their names to an open letter, promising to be mindful of their customers, their employees, their suppliers, their communities, and — weightily listed last — their shareholders. “In shocking reversal,” read the headline of Michael Hiltzik’s column in The Los Angeles Times, “Big Business puts the shareholder value myth in the grave.”

That "myth" stems from the long-deceased economist Milton Friedman, who wrote back in 1970 that corporations exist solely to maximize shareholder value. In that context, the letter from those 181 CEOs reads like an evolution. “The new statement is 300 words long, and shareholders aren’t mentioned until word 250,” noted Fortune’s Alan Murray.

And yet among those 181 names is that of Mark Trudeau, who is CEO of Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals. Mallinckrodt makes about $1.1 billion a year from an off-patent medicine whose price has increased by about 100,000% since 2000. It has paid more than $100 million to settle charges that it bribed doctors to prescribe the drug and maintained an illegal monopoly. Mallinckrodt's scant investment in science disqualifies it from PhRMA. The company sold billions of opioid painkillers amid a national crisis, and, in an internal email, a Mallinckrodt employee jokingly likened oxycodone’s addictive property to that of Doritos.

All that being said, Mallinckrodt cannot be accused of maximizing shareholder value. Since June 2013, when Trudeau began as CEO, the company’s share price has fallen by 90%.