The way he manipulates people can come across as super awkward and cheesy via text, but many people really do completely fall for it in person. The fact that he can't stop doing it prevented us from ever working productively as a team, and I couldn't ever tolerate it for long.
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The reason that I ended up in that situation is because the company was founded by 3 people, not 2, and I nearly always interacted with the 3rd co-founder who ended up leaving, partly because he didn't get along with James either and also due to personal issues in his life.
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By that point, I already felt trapped, because there was a software project that's very important to me and it needed to continue being supported. Ended up just digging the hole deeper and deeper as time went on and then it became either James or myself leaving, and he won that.
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Early on, he tricked me into not being director, and that's how he was able to take over, because as a 50% shareholder I can't remove him as director and he abused those powers to do whatever he wanted including lying to the company's lawyer and turning them against me. *shrug*
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I could pursue it legally, but I'd need to spend a lot more legal fees than I already have just to deal with their ongoing nonsense which doesn't involve any actual legal case. There's nothing to get out of it other than trying to destroy the remnant of the company anyway.
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Better to cut ties completely and move on than wasting energy on a fight that's ultimately pointless.
If you're able to that is
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That's essentially done at this point, but I intend to hold onto my 50% ownership of the company largely as self-defense. I'm letting the many other people he has screwed over deal with him. As you can see, he's still around causing problems / turning people against me though.
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It really didn't help that Twitter gave him the project's account despite the fact that it was using my personal email, personal phone number and had TOTP 2FA. They reverted the email from my personal one to daniel.micay@copperhead.co (changed months before) which gave it to him.
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It doesn't really make any sense because it was the account for the open source project and there was explicitly a separate account for the corporation. Oh well. I'm not getting that back at this point. He pretty much pretended to be me and the team behind the work from there.
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The deception stopped working over time because people can see that they've done absolutely nothing of any value for privacy/security or even real maintenance of old code. It's way easier to see the reality now especially with so much accomplished in the real project since then.
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Twitter was the main place I published information on what was happening including ultimatums / threats they'd made, and by turning over the account Twitter let them cover it all up and hide the published evidence. Twitter later acknowledged it was a bad move but won't change it.