eli5 why do companies with billions in the bank care about stock prices. Wouldn’t they be financially fine if the stock lost money?
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To clarify some of the other answers here, I think we need to explain what stocks are.
Imagine you want to start a widget business. You can make money selling widgets, but you have to manufacture them first. Factories are expensive, but you don’t have money yet because you haven’t manufactured widgets to sell yet.
So how do you get money? You might just get a bank loan, but for various reasons that’s often not possible. So instead, you go around and sell pieces of your not-yet-existent widget business. You say to people “If you give me money now, I will give you this document (a stock) that entitles you to own 1/10,000th (or whatever percentage) of my widget business”.
So now you have a bunch of money, which you can use to build a factory. You start selling widgets and making a profit.
But you don’t _own_ the business (or not all of it anyway). All those people who you sold chunks of your business (stocks) to want a say in how _their_ business is run. So as part of the deal they get to appoint a board, who is your boss and who decides how the business is run (in reality the founder of the business probably owns a lot of stock and has a lot of influence, but it amounts to a similar situation in the end).
So what do the actual owners of the business want (including you if you have a lot of stock)? They want to get a return on the money they gave you. They want to the stock price of the company to go up so that the stock they bought can be sold to someone else for more than they paid for it. And since these are the people who own the company and run it via the board, what they care about is what the company cares about.
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