Re: He was an employee
Well, would be interesting to know the numbers behind that "pretty big bonus". In the firms I've worked, there's been bonuses, but for individual patents the most you'd see is $3000 overall, from rewards for idea submission, patent filing and patent grant - typically the numbers would be shared by co-inventors, not multiplied up. Get a lot of patents and it adds up, and there may be milestone awards (10/15/25 patents granted), and these can be larger numbers.
IIRC a company has to give you something in return for ownership of the patent, even though your name has to be on it as an inventor.
Eastman will be on to a tough task proving he invented these (or co-invented) - especially if he had no interactions with the team whose names are on the patents. It's entirely possible a team may have come up with an idea/solution independently of him that happened to have the same solution and got it to patent, notwithstanding his email to a VP about the idea (which muddies the water a bit if the VP then gave the problem statement to another engineering team to solve).
I very much doubt there'd be no "Find my iPhone" now if Eastman hadn't thought of it back then. SWMBO is always asking me to find hers, for starters. Not helped by it always being switched to silent mode, so have to roam the house listening for the vibrate-noise while ringing it.