He would’ve screwed you anyway. “Equity” is so laughably easy to dilute to nada in startups through various means that there are numerous articles and parodies of it out there.
I worked for a startup that didn’t meet its VC’s “valuation” goal even though we were stupidly profitable nearly from day one. Market-forces driven downround. When I left, the options I had were previously promised to be worth hundreds of thousands but because of dilution, weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. I didn’t let them give me options “in lieu of base comp” though, so I ended up ok but not everyone did.
To be fair here, technically throwing neutrons at matter has only some probability of causing it to fission, and statistics tells us how many do. It’s just that there are so many more neutrons and nuclei than there are people, so we can say with statistical confidence that under such and such conditions, y will occur when x happens.
Not that different. Just more samples and observations.