[kkielhofner]

I've seen this happen before. Especially with startups, I think it's a mixture of:

- CEO ego.

- Although patents by employees are assigned to the company and unequivocally owned by the company, many early stage (and especially paranoid) CEOs worry about the optics of having many named inventors leaving the company. If you're Google, IBM, etc with 100K employees filing 10K patents per year no one cares if X number of those employees in listed filings leave the company. If you're a relatively small, early stage company with a few hundred patents losing just a few key employees named on filings raises red flags for investors, journalists, etc as they could represent a substantial portion of your "inventors"/IP/brain trust, etc and thus, your valuation. Of course this kind of action is very transparent but with her own "reality distortion field" I wouldn't be surprised if anyone who reviewed these thought she was actually responsible for some portion of the invention.

- Some companies have a very broad policy for who to include as a named inventor. She could have been part of a single conversation/meeting/etc and required listing.

- CEO ego. Not a typo, I listed this twice because in this as in many of these cases, ego is likely 90% of the reason she's listed on these. Frankly this kind of behavior is insulting to the other named inventors that actually did the work, but what recourse do they have? Is battling the CEO to get her name off a filing worth leaving your job for?