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Is almost certainly not true. The employees are getting shares, from what I read elsewhere they get the option to convert up to 2% of their pay each year into shares at fair market value, but they're not getting control of the company. For one thing, I haven't seen anything that indicates these are voting shares, which they would have to be to have any say on the fate of the company. For another thing, even if every employee opts for the full 2% that's still an insignificant ownership stake. If you're very generous and say Beau's has 150 employees averaging $100k a year, that's $300k in equity sold each year. That's not even a 1% ownership stake, they'll have no say in how the company is run or if it eventually sells out to a macro.In selling the company to it’s workers, what the Beauchesne’s just did was ensure that their company pretty much can’t be bought out – not in any Big Bad traditional sense anyway. (Heck, for all we know the company will collectively vote on being bought out by a Macro Brewer ten years from now, but could you really see that happening?) The beautiful thing about co-ops and employee-owned structures is that you have so many points of accountability to answer to. Even if 50% of the workforce is a little apathetic to major business decisions most of the time, they still get a vote – at the very least on their board of directors – no matter what. So when something comes up at work that they do care about, they’re not helpless to top-down decision making.