> we need merit-based employment that disregards elite and academic status

We effectively already have middle management being used to school elites; they get tours in various companies in the network, which means they build impressive resumes that would "win" any competition based on merit/success history.

Indeed, this may be necessary: the baseline investors committed to a company keep all the free riders on board through growth volatility. Is it too much to show their people the ropes?

It may be necessary, but it's probably self-destructive: foreign investors are often most interested in new technologies, not to profit from them, but to learn enough to compete. So they'll out-bid investors without such strategic aims. They're very much aligned with open-source, because their people leave with knowledge and the company is left without IP protections.

So... it's complicated. Going all-"merit" helped with civil service in the 1870's - 1950's, but people learned any system can be gained, and we can no longer afford slack-maximizing.