A startup I worked at used equity as an argument for 80 hour work weeks, but kept employees in the dark as much as possible about everything relating to said eq

A startup I worked at used equity as an argument for 80 hour work weeks, but kept employees in the dark as much as possible about everything relating to said equity. It took two years to find out that our equity was essentially worthless. The only silver lining to this story is that no one was actually pulling 80 hour weeks because the information asymmetry that the executive suite maintained around this topic created an atmosphere of mistrust and a common opinion that our equity must be worthless, since if we had been given something actually valuable then they would have wanted us to know about it.