I seem to recall from Cassarino's deposition that IH said that even though they thought Rossi was outside the terms of his contract they would make sure that Rossi was well compensated if only he could demonstrate that his technology worked. Did you not see that?
Well, they didn't tell Rossi though. Wonder why? I believe they did offer him something (nowhere close to $89M) to stop the test and just hand over a smaller working device including all the IP... I suppose this was around the same time Rossi understood they simply wanted the IP and was never going to pay according to contract. He then went into Flintstone mode, ie first the money then the full IP...