Sure but investors have a say in how the company manages its finances so they won’t vote in favor of crashing the share price so the company can buy them back for cheap!

In a better market investors would expect their profit from well established companies to come from dividends and the share price would be fairly stable so investors looking for high profits would sell shares from established companies with stable dividends to people who want safe investments and would move on to growing companies where they could potentially make profit from the share price increasing rapidly until the company reaches a point where it’s stable…

That exists, plenty of huge companies that pay good dividends with share prices that are moving at snail pace (look at the share price of IBM vs Apple for the last 25 years or so), but these days that’s not what investors want, they expect profit from the line going up and selling their shares 🤷

Even then, just like you expect a pay increase to follow inflation, people expect their profit from a company to go up with time, may it be from the price going up or from dividends increasing…