Frankly, the investors who set the initial valuation (presumably used to set the strike price of the employee options) and later the $0 valuation (rendering the options worthless) and then giving away the IP that they declared worthless (despite the company not fundamentally changing) deserve a lot of the scrutiny.

If the company had simply been left to make their own choices like laying off the employees and buying out investors, this would have been a different story.