I feel like we need a new default corporate ownership model. A company can be in operation for decades and grow headcount massively but the shareholders at the top retain the same percentage of control as when it was tiny and new. Many people contribute to a company's success and its not reflected in the ownership.
If ownership could accrue in employees to a non trivial degree, they would have some power to push back when some bonehead exec tries to blow the whole place up. It's their livelihood as well as just the shareholders.
Right now when one of these giants at the top falls, they take out a lot of other people with them.
That's not really what happened to Unity. Unity was started by 3 dudes in Copenhagen. Since then, the company moved its HQ to California, went public, and the original founders have all departed. 2 departed long ago before any of this. The last one was the CTO until being quietly replaced in March of this year.
If anything, Unity became a beast outside of the control of the very ones who fostered it. Sure, each founder could probably retire off the money they made, but this doesn't seem like something they would have allowed if they were still around.
Tangent aside:
>If ownership could accrue in employees to a non trivial degree, they would have some power to push back when some bonehead exec tries to blow the whole place up.
How would that happen? The thing is that employees in many places are paid in stock as is. In theory they can all collectively do the very thing you suggest by all pulling out stock. But it's hard for that many people to come together and rally under one cause.
If ownership could accrue in employees to a non trivial degree, they would have some power to push back when some bonehead exec tries to blow the whole place up. It's their livelihood as well as just the shareholders.
Right now when one of these giants at the top falls, they take out a lot of other people with them.