About 300,000 of those units had vested, but Ben discovered they had been transferred outside the employee system. I confronted Monica, and she warned me that if I left Northstar, I would be walking away from more than a paycheck. That night, my wife Clare told me not to sign anything. The next morning, I searched the old Atlas project files. I had designed much of its original architecture, but an important ownership folder was missing. Then I found an old email from the former general counsel telling me to keep a technical contribution statement because it might become important during a corporate restructuring.

The document showed that I owned a 34% contribution interest in Atlas. When Ryan discovered I was investigating, he admitted management had told him to monitor me. Soon afterward, I received an anonymous warning telling me to stop looking for Atlas. Instead, I contacted an intellectual-property attorney. She discovered that my original equity had been transferred into a holding company connected to the investment group preparing Northstar’s next major transaction. Then another former engineer contacted me with something even more damaging: a recording from years earlier in which an executive discussed cleaning up the engineers’ ownership during the restructuring.