You are thinking long term profitable, but most of the current "activist investors" barely think about short term profitability, and mostly from the perspective of their own profitability selling shares or running a short somewhere and "indirectly" helping their short by giving bad advice to a different company. They mostly read the quarterly reports and that mostly to look for "easy profits" Company A is making that they could pressure Company B to do for a quarter or two to bump stock prices before they sell again. Swoop in when a company has a bad quarter, pressure them to have "one good quarter", sell, rinse, repeat. (Makes them good money, makes most companies a race to the bottom to appease their whims as short-term investors.)

There were also long term failures, but the investors are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

After their flight scheduling meltdown due to outdated software it took them two weeks to restore back to a normal schedule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Southwest_Airlines_schedu...

They've also made some longer term strategic flops, like investment into Hawaii, which by its isolated long-haul nature is significantly different from the rest of their flights (usually short hauls that can maximize aircraft utilization per day)