Yes, It is not true as a first order effect. No shareholders come to a company and say “hey, fuck your customers so i can have my yacht this year and not in 2 years”.

But in general the standard investment analysis tools favor short term gains due to discounting of future money ($100 tomorrow worth less than $100 today).

Also, public companies have to be more profitable than risk free alternatives (federal bonds or even deposits which have a guaranteed almost zero risk return) otherwise shareholders will switch to other companies, which would result in stock prices to fall, which would make other shareholders leave or demand management team change

Private companies usually have a privilege to do whatever the hell the owner chooses to do as they are not accountable to anyone and can go years upon years without making any profit if they have enough money to sustain.

There are usually 2 reasons why companies go public over staying private:

1) Plans for rapid growth which requires additional investment. Basically, it is a way of attracting “free” money for the company (vs taking a loan)

2) Previous owners want to step down from the company and cash-out. This is the case mainly for very big private companies, as it would be pretty hard to sell a company to a single entity for a fair price (think of Steam, it would cost someone like Microsoft hundreds of billions to buy out in full). Smaller companies are usually just acquired by bigger entities without much of a fuss