Yeah it's pretty naive. Google trying to make the world a better place would actually be illegal and would place the managers in jail for defrauding investors. Google's mission is to make as much money as possible, typical tactics include creating a good corporate image.
That a company's mission is to make money for their shareholders does not mean they pursue that mission to the exclusion of all else. They can also pursue side goals, from making the company a nice place to work at, to giving back to the society which allowed them to exist and grow in the first place. Some of these goals may have little to no tangible results on the bottomline, which is ok as long as they don't compromise their main objective. You seem to like to view the world through a cynical lens which is no more true to reality than a naive lens.
First of all: no jail. This is civil law, not criminal.
Second: it's pretty hard not to have an excuse to do anything you want if you're the board + management. Google, and most other companies, give to charitable organisations, for example. "Now", you'll say, "they're just doing this for PR".
Maybe... But using the PR argument actually works perfectly fine for anything altruistic a company may do.
Unless management explicitly states that they're harming investors for the public good, it's almost impossible to run afoul of the law. Sick pay that exceeds the law? Important for employee retention (and PR). Match your employees' donation to any certified charity? Important to create a community (and PR).
If a publicly owned company started to contribute too much money to charity, they would certainly be subject to shareholder lawsuits and a proxy war over management.
Sick pay is easier to do because it's related to retaining good employees.
But generally, as Milton Friedman famously wrote, "the social responsibility of corporations is to increase their profits".
Defrauding investors yields jailtime more often than not. Depending on the particular case is might be a civil case, but even civil cases often result in incarceration.
I'm not going to argue with the rest of your post because your belief that a company might be doing "anything altruistic" is just sad for me, perhaps laughable for others.
The mission is to organize & make available the world's information... which coincidentally is equally compatible with increasing shareholder value.
I think most people dramatically underestimate the amount of resources Google invests in all sorts of programs (including R&D, charitable donations, education, partnerships and so much more) because 1) they don't use it as a negotiating tactic, and 2) the cash cow of the ads business provides an enormously long leash for experimentation and.
Even with Apple, which has more than double the cash (and cash flow), doesn't have this flexibility because of its business model. As a hardware company, volumes, revenue & margin are predictable and anticipated, baked into the stock price with an assumption of -- for the last few years -- dividends. Amazon is at the other extreme. Until very recently, as a result of AWS' runaway success, Amazon had posted negative-to-zero profits for its entire history, reinvesting nearly 100% of free cash flow into business expansion.
No matter what you might think of Google, among the huge tech companies they're unique in their ability to spend enormous sums on things that absolutely do not directly increase shareholder value. The belief within the company, and within the investment community, that some of these moonshots & experiments will eventually stimulate stepwise returns are why they continue to run this way. It's cultural, and ultimately, one of the foundations of "googleyness".
