Is he worth that much though? Everyone seems to paint him as a genius, but is his value 5x the other engineers on the team? 10x? 100x? It seems like there are plenty of smart and talented people you could hire for your self-driving car initiative that are 1% his price. Or, flipping it around, if self-driving engineers are really worth $100MM+ then maybe they should band together and work for themselves.
It isn't uncommon for employees to sign over their rights over the intellectual property they develop using the company resources. The argument being those resources were a necessary component and the person was compensated for delivering that product. Some go even further to cover any work done off hours as well because the company's resources provide the knowledge necessary for that work, but that can be more of a grey area
God forbid an engineer get paid what he’s actually worth.
If anything he should’ve been paid much more. The automobile industry is a multi trillion dollar industry he’d be be disrupting.
Honestly, Google may have been paying him to “die” like tech companies do sometimes as rationale for acquisition: to eliminate competition.
Maybe he picked up on it and decided to move on.
Google doesn’t own technology he invented.