Edit: A guy downloads 9.7GB of other people's work, walks off with it, and sells it. Flushing years of work from hundreds of engineers down the toilet. You down voters really support that? Amazing.
They are probably misinterpreting your comment; at first I thought you meant Levandowski was the one who invented the LIDAR components, so he should be financially rewarded outside the normal Google comp system (by doing this whole steal-then-get-acquired strategy)
Anyone can be the primary beneficiary of their own invention, it they want to pay their own salary, build their own products, hire their own layers, sell their wares etc..
If you want to collect $150K/year while you do R&D for Google, which may produce not that much, while you leverage all of their knowledge, investment, user-base tools etc - well, then you fork over the rights to Google.
'Inventing' something is not just some guy coming up with an idea, and then making that 'invention' worth something is usually harder than inventing it in the first place.