> I see little evidence pointing in the other direction.

Hrm, I think it depends on what they meant by co-op style (as in the previous sentence they say "primarily worker owned"). I agree singular leadership and direction is important, but that's not necessarily at odds with primarily worker owned, even if it's at odds with some versions of worker owned.

An example of a company that has multiple CEOs that have driven it to success in different times and in slightly different contexts would by Microsoft. Originally helmed by Gates in a manner somewhat similar to Jobs and Musk, it's now helmed by Nadella to great success. I would count that due to Nadella having a singular vision, and buy in from the company so he can achieve that. I'm not sure being worker owned (other than it being kind of hard to keep it that way once you get large enough...) would change that as long as he still had the confidence of the board (which in that case would be a council of workers I guess?).

Another way to think of this might be the (traditional) American auto industry. While not worker owned, as I understand it the unions have quite a lot of power (including board seats), and that might be seen as somewhat of a proxy for large successful (significantly) worker owned companies, and those have gone through periods of great success at times as well.

Singular leadership, sure, but we accept shareholders wielding power as normal and fine and not contrary to putting one person in charge. Why not workers?

Steve Jobs didn't own Apple; he'd apparently sold his entire stake around the time he was ousted in 1985 [0].

Your evidence doesn't quite say what you think it does; you are talking about day-to-day management, I'm talking about ownership structure and how day-to-day management gets appointed/fired.

But no specific evidence, just first principles reasoning. It is hard to see why it would do badly.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/steve-jobs-original-apple...

> But no specific evidence, just first principles reasoning. It is hard to see why it would do badly.

There are concrete examples of worker-dominated organizations: schools, public transit entities, etc., where powerful worker unions dominate policy. They are almost universally unsuccessful, as worker interests take precedence over delivering a product to the consumer.

But none of those things are worker owned either; they are generally owned by the public. The success or failure of a school or public transport entity has nearly no impact on the success or failure of the workers (short of catastrophic mismanagement, anyway).

I suppose we have trailed things like worker ownership in early stage startups with high equity compensation. That might be evidence that it works well. Letting workers capture most of the value they create would be at least as interesting experiment for me than Universal Basic Income; but I think UBI has much more coverage as a political idea.

The danger with arguing from first principles is that a lot of real-world failures sound pretty fantastic. Take communism, or the satirical "A Modest Proposal".

If you thought “A Modest Proposal” sounded pretty fantastic, you must have read a different essay by that title than I did. And saying that communism sounds good in theory is also a pretty superficial reading of Marx and others.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. And the jury’s still out on Apple.