I don't think "whatever is profitable" pins it down enough. They do what is profitable on a short time scale. They don't do what is profitable over long time scales like 30 or 50 or 100 years. If they did, they would not be able to get away with, for example, privatizing profits and socializing costs, because what enables them to do that is that the profits show up in the short term but the costs only show up in the long term.

Back when corporate governance worked, shareholders were mostly individuals and they typically held shares on a long time horizon. That created obvious incentives to judge corporations by profits on a long time horizon. But now, most shareholders are mutual funds who judge individual corporations on a short time horizon--if the corporations don't make their numbers, the mutual fund trades their stock away. That means corporations have no incentive now to look at profits on a long time horizon--even though their shareholders do.