

The point is that major shareholder will try to hide insider knowledge to sell their stock before a big crash.
They pump the stock value as much as possible and sell it before it crashes. They make a shit ton of money and some suckers are left holding the bag.



Having the capabilities to take on debt helps to garner investments.
You can do a joint venture, take on a bit of debt but get more money of it.
And we’ve seen many mega corpos finance their venture throught debt (see Uber business model).
So I’d say that it was true in the past, but corpos are getting bolder.