It's like taking an idea hostage. If you fail to pull it off, you make sure that nobody else has the chance to try it without first paying you for that privilege. It's supposed to help somehow.
Intellectual Property - so there might be trade secrets, patents, etc developed in the course of research. Even if the business goes bust, they might have learned valuable lessons.
They definitely have valuable IP already: whatever slide deck/demo reel/kompromat they used to pull this nonsense off is clearly worth its weight in unobtanium.
It is very needlessly cynical. Helion has a number of very clever ideas, integrated in a way that has impressed me over the years. I would not dismiss them out of hand.
