It’s a bit tragic that Ilya and company achieved the exact opposite of what they intended apparently, by driving those they attempted to slow down into the arms of people with more money and less morals. Well.
People have gotten into their heads that researchers are good and corporations are bad in every case which is simply not true. OpenAI's mission is worse for humanity than Microsoft's.
If Microsoft came up with a way of making trillion dollars in profit by enslaving half the planet, it kinda has to do it.
You're talking about investors and shareholders like they're just machines that only ever prioritize profit. That's just obviously not true.
Most of stock is not owned by individual persons (not that there aren't individuals that don't give a shit about enslaving people), but other companies and institutions that by charter prioritize profit. E.g. Microsoft's institutional ownership is around 70%.
Probably safe to say Henry Ford had considerable power in Ford Motor Co compared most executives today?
That is not actually true, necessarily. Your power is typically very term dependent. A CEO who is also president of the board, and a majority shareholder, has far more power than a CEO who just stepped in temporarily and has only the powers provided by the by-laws.
Regardless, the solution to "I want to do something ethical that is not strictly in the company's best interest" is to make the case that it is the company's best interest. For example, "By investing in our employees we are actually prioritizing shareholder value". If you position it as "this is a move that hurts shareholders", of course that's illegal - companies have an obligation to every shareholder.
That also means that if you give your employees stock, they now have investor rights too. You can structure your company this way from the start, it's trivial and actually the norm in tech - stock is handed out to many employees.