> An average family person doesn't want to risk their time, money, and health on helping to pivot Audi to a company that makes bleeding edge EVs.
That article is from 2017. EVs were already more or less an accepted mainstream technology, even though certainly not the majority of the automotive market yet. You're making it sound like it's as difficult as it was for Tesla back in 2003- the union was simply demanding Audi management to respond to the needs of the market and expand its product line, for the betterment of the company and to protect their livelihoods by staying competitive. Audi building EVs does not require, as far as I know, a pivot.
Theranos is also a good example to mention. Perhaps if it was a worker-owned co-op or a union there, some sort of countervailing force against both managerial and investor incompetence, that fiasco could have been averted. Perhaps with a system in place to provide support against those powerful forces, and someone sympathetic to listen to whistleblowers, Ian Gibbons would still be alive.
It's all well and good to lionize Randian revolutionary lone geniuses, but the creative destruction they tend to wreak in their wake tends to fall upon a lot of the little people. And worse off, these geniuses at world-changing companies are few and far between, and far outnumbered by copycats and wannabes who cause more damage through imitation. We have checks and balances in our societal governance; why not likewise in our corporate governance?