I think this is naive. Selling off a large company like this is not smart, think about it for a minute. First, who owns 3M (I own a handful of shares for example). Average shareholders will get screwed. Then think about who will buy their assets (IP and manufacturing). Will it be foreign companies? What will the contracts for medical supplies look like for like? Companies that discover they are doing harm will be incentivized to bury, lie, and hide. It’s not that simple,
What J&J tried is called the Texas two-step: they fold the liability into a subsidiary, which relocates to another state and declares bankruptcy. This has failed for that specific case but that is not a given.
This is especially common for industries like mining which are guaranteed to require significant cleanup:
