Not to mention that modern-day IT systems are such a mess that you'd need a crazy amount if time to find and access them all.
I'm not a lawyer, but as other commenters mention, this would be both illegal and totally reversible because it would be a decision made due to coercion. In the same way a contract is not legally binding if someone holds a gun to your head and compels you to sign, the decision to give the coup leader control of the company wouldn't be legally binding either.
that being said, engineering the straw purchase and smurfing of shares to produce a controlling, or super-leveraging investors group sounds like what the "bad guy" does.
Sometimes you have to fight as dirty as the other fella is willing to.
That being said; many companies specifically structure their share offerings in such a way to keep the muggles from even being able to accrue meaningful voting rights. See Facebook/Meta's share partitioning strategy.
The fact is you have one meaningful vote: and that's "I will not work for you." After that the best you can do is raise awareness amongst others to hopefully get them to make the same decision. As usual for our capitalist system, however, greed is considered good, so the number of successes you'll see starving a project for talent will be far lower than implementations that shouldn't have been done being done because the lucre was too good for someone to pass up.
A better, imo, plan would be to convince the most impactful engineers to join you in creating a new, competing company in a location where non-compete agreements aren't binding.
this narcissistic mindset is THE reason why if anything like this were ever tried, it would fail spectacularly
