You can make the opposite point with the same logic though: "the powerful, dangerous tobacco industry was given a loophole in the flavored cigarette ban allowing them to prey disproportionately on vulnerable Black populations."
But from the OP it sounds like the cofounder might be continuing in the same line of business, but wants to "pivot" and jettison the now-dead weight of the technologist.
If this is the case it seems plausible that his contributions and R&D are still relevant, even if they're throwing out his code, and so perhaps he's entitled to whatever stake he vested over those first two years.
I agree completely. My favorite podcasts are crowd-funded with no ads, but the least-bad approach to ad reads is when someone reads a script, verbatim, in a bored monotone. Especially when it's not one of the hosts reading, but a producer whose voice you don't recognize and implicitly trust. But this is really rare.
The big missing piece is roles. No service uses a root access key directly. Instead, there's a webserver role with access to a relevant secrets group but no access to data warehouse secrets, for example.
Access keys can be provisioned and downloaded straight onto the box from the service. Sure, a compromise is bad, but only exposes the secrets that would be available on the pwned box regardless.
This may not have been a serious question but I'll give a serious answer: depending on the interviewer, you could get bonus points for going "above and beyond" or, yes, you could be penalized for "not reading the spec."
I've found that the best way to handle it in a conventional whiteboard interview is to mention it when appropriate and offer to add the functionality later.
"Now, here's the part of the code where I'd deal with odd N. Since we're guaranteed even N in the problem statement I'll skip this for now, but we can come back to harden this function later if you like."
If one company will pay you 500k for working 60h/week and another will pay 500k for working 40h/week, then choosing the latter isn't entitlement. It's market forces at work.
If you think developers are overpaid, then just say that.
There's a difference between saying "I believe we can develop X" and "we currently have X." As I understand it, Holmes and Theranos did the latter. And that's fraud.