Public corporations have very good accountability mechanisms, but the things to which management are held accountable are not in line with what someone striving for global social equality might like. The company is accountable to shareholders for growth and profit. For a consumer backlash to change a company's operations would require it to interfere with management's ability to show the shareholders that continued growth and profit. Perhaps it's theoretically possible for the government to enforce that Apple (and all US corporations operating globally) to have working conditions "on the same level with the USA's." The essential problem with this is that it would essentially defeat the whole point of outsourcing the operations in the first place -- they're in China because appropriately-skilled people will work there for cheap.

What's really remarkable is that with all of the cash in 'secondary markets' these days it's not like they couldn't get all the growth capital they could possibly want without a public offering (unless they wanted to start a moon base or something).

Even cashing out early investors seems like it would be fairly easy given the institutional cash abundance.

Going IPO these days seems to just be about getting access to less sophisticated investors. Maybe they should just put a "buy a share of FB" button on everyone's Facebook profile and cut out all the middlemen.