It's wild how many people don't know about this but I'll try and give a condensed version of the story.
In 1916 Ford Motors found themselves with 60 million dollars of Capital Surplus. Henry Ford wanted to use this Surplus to invest in new production plants, cut costs on the Model T, and continued to increase wages for workers as opposed to paying out special dividends to shareholders.
This pissed off minority shareholders. Primarily the Dodge brothers who made a lawsuit out of it. In 1919 the lawsuit had made its way to the Michigan Supreme Court which ruled that Henry Ford could not lower consumer costs and raise employee wages and was made to pay out special dividends to shareholders.
This became the principle called “Shareholder Primacy” which basically pushes companies to treat share holders as their first priority.
This also set a precedent for corporate America going forward. So when you hear about record profits yet wages stay stagnant part of that reason is because profit and surplus go back to the share holders, not to workers.