The other big component of this that's missing to me is how much he was asking delta to buy it for. If he really invested 100k into it and was asking for some reasonable multiple for his code+idea then it's probably disingenuous of them to not just pay him for it (and maybe pay for him to help dev it).

That said, maybe he asked for something absurd like a billion dollars for what was effectively "a good idea." Hard to know without that and the fact that the information isn't in here leads me to believe that the answer doesn't land in his favor.