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Comments (372)

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  klausa
  I feel like I'm going crazy reading the comments, and I guess, big props to the author for writing this in a way that pulls it off.The issue here is, IMHO, not "Nvidia owes me stock in an ironclad way and gets away with it because of statue of limitations", but "I accepted an offer from Nvidia but the paperwork between the offer and the options grant differed in a way that both benefits me, and nobody noticed or cared about until now".The original offer was for 25k shares, vesting over 4 years.The options paperwork says 25k shares, vesting over 4 _quarters_.Now, I'm not a lawyer, and certainly not a securities lawyer, but that seems like it could be reasonably chalked down to a clerical error on the options paperwork? "You made a mistake and now I can get a billion dollars more than we agreed to originally" doesn't feel like a great lawsuit!
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  jonas21
  An open question is what happened to the 15,625 shares that he received when he exercised his options in 1996?If he had held on to those, they would be worth even more than the additional 9,375 shares he was entitled to -- about $1.7 billion using the same numbers in the post.My guess is that he probably sold them when they were worth a lot less then they are now, and would have done the same with the additional shares too.
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  Eric_Gullichsen
  Author here. Thanks for all the comments, I've been hesitant to post this to the court of public opinion, yet curiosity about what the HN community would think caused me to push the button. My lawyers - who were really excellent - represented me (on contingency!) because it seemed the chance of a judge not accepting a motion to dismiss (for a variety of reasons I don't want to detail here) was non-zero. And the process of discovery would be very costly for NVIDIA with depositions from many executives who have better things to do.
• jfrbfbreudh
  Similar story, I was an early engineer at a startup, typical 4 year vest etc. When my 1 year came around, I got my options paperwork and it was different from my original offer, so I didn’t sign it, and I quit instead (I was planning to quit anyway). I figure if it amounts to something, I’d just sue to get my original shares yesterday.Thankfully the startup failed and it isn’t something I have to think about.
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  lordnacho
  The angle I haven't heard, yet I think would make the most sense, is that you both understood the agreement correctly, at the time.Somebody did the paperwork wrong, but paperwork isn't the agreement. You agreed what you agreed, thought everything was in order, and then discovered an error in the documents.It doesn't seem like there's a claim here.
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  jwpapi
  As this is an interesting story I think we need a change to HN algorithm.The title is misleading, they don’t owe him.The story is NVIDIA made a mistake and OP tried to exploit it and failed and is now grabbing another straw with that post.It was not intentional shares to his or Nvidia’s understanding.Everybody reading the actual story would not just upvote this.The upvotes must be simple big corp hate +misleading title
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  binlog
  > Here in the land of the free, it turns out a company only has to honor its contractual obligations for a little while.If Nvidia showed you contract paperwork that proved they overpaid you 9,375 shares in 1993, would you agree to pay them back the present value? After all contracts should be enforceable indefinitely right?
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  maerF0x0
  Ok, my 2 cents, I dont see why NVIDIA doesnt just settle with this guy for pennies on the dollar simply for good will. When I do business with people if they have any sort of basis (such as legitimately doing work for me) it's important to me to see them whole. I wouldn't be surprised if this person would have settled for even a 1% valuation ($10M is life altering money to >99% of americans) and it's not like they would have to pay it out, they'd just print the shares. (maybe vest it over 4 years too, har har).Just my 2c and how I think about business. I get it's not the American Way™ but maybe it should be.
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  reticulates
  You are ultimately responsible for asserting your contractual rights. Your stock options had an expiry and you did not exercise them in time. The letter you received notifying that you had 15,625 vested options was not an award in of itself, it was only a courtesy notifying you that you had vested options to exercise before they expired. Even if due to ambiguous wording it could be argued that 25,000 options had vested at the time instead of 15,625, that was only relevant until the options expired. You needed to assert your rights to the [additional 9,375] vested options before they expired. So, this issue died in 1996.I had a similar experience although over a shorter time horizon. I was in a dispute with a corporation which prompted me to pore over every word in every previously signed agreement. I discovered, due to an obvious typo in a stock option agreement, more options had vested than had been intended. After some pushback, they eventually relented and awarded me the options.Given the amount of money involved, it was worth engaging lawyers to see if NVIDIA would pay you some money to save the hassle of dealing with it, but there is and was zero prospect of this ever being awarded in your favor by a court since the options expired.
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  neom
  This guy has had some interesting side quests.https://time.com/archive/6735546/hes-the-master-of-his-domai...
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  bambax
  > Here in the land of the free, it turns out a company only has to honor its contractual obligations for a little while.Eceryone everywhere appears to hate statuses of limitations, but they exist for a reason, namely that after some time society needs to move on. It may be disappointing, or even cruel, for the victims, but we can't keep litigating the past forever.Espescially so in the "land of the free" which is the land of lawyers and lawsuits.
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  whall6
  You should sell your right to litigate this. There are hundreds of firms that would pay you to take this on. Would involve near zero effort for you and would also check the box of being “about the principle”.
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  tempestn
  It seems to me that if OP had been granted 25k shares instead of 15k, he would have sold 25k shares instead of 15k. So even aside from the statute of limitations, the damages would be something like the value of 10k shares in 1993, perhaps plus 30 years of interest.
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  omgJustTest
  Read papers given to you!When someone dismisses your interpretation it serves to understand it well.Additionally: A contractual mistake would likely not return specific performance (stock) unless special conditions were met.For example: a company makes a stock mistake, you observe that at the time it happens, but then do nothing until you see the stock increase in value. Company could assert you _were_ due the stock but the value of that stock is determined by the time-of-breach and they return you $.Unless you had a substantial claim to voting interest would probably be monetary reward!NYL
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  pugworthy
  To satisfy the curious, "I have been everything, and nothing is worth it."Well quoted.
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  merek
  > Then, in April 1996 - by which time I’d expatriated to the Kingdom of Tonga and was working on various internet startup schemesWhy would an American working in software in the mid 90s expatriate to Tonga, a tiny island nation, population ~100k, virtually no tech industry, with little or no internet back then? (assuming Eric is American).Maybe a govt IT contract, but it sounds at odds to "working on various internet startup schemes".
• koolba
  Given his advanced age, he should have sold his lawsuit rights. Sealed bid auction and could even let Nvidia bid as well.Every 1% expected value would put it at $10 million dollars.
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  lquist
  Why does a stockholder have to reassert their rights to hold the stock that they already own?
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  ZiiS
  For me the fair outcome would be Nvidia paying the 1996 share-price + inflation; not the 2026 share-price. They could neither force him to hold them for 30 years; not prevent him from having bought as many as he wanted. The only error was they slightly underpaid him.I can also see why these claims age out; else all old companies would have enough uncertainty they would be uninvestable.
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  isatty
  Way of my league here but if it starts with a B and they said sue them, why not go ahead and sue them?You’re not the only one who want to see this go somewhere.
• MotoriX
  That has to be one of the most painful “I should have checked the paperwork” stories ever. Imagine discovering 30 years later that your forgotten NVIDIA shares could have been worth a billion dollars.
• coef2
  When I worked at a startup, I didn't care about my stock option at all. My expectation is really low for any early stage companies. I understand why something like this could happen.The author would have sold the shares before Nvidia stock skyrocketed even if he had received them. So, the actual loss might not be as large as a billion dollars in reality.
• epgui
  I was kicked out from the MD programme at Université de Sherbrooke due to a procedural failure. The school covered it up, I was devastated.Six years later after filing the equivalent of a FOIA I realized something didn’t add up. I filed for judicial review, it was denied on prescription grounds (delay) so the court had no need to examine the case on its merits. I appealed, the judgment held.So yeah, delay/prescription is a real and super serious thing, especially in administrative law. Very strict.
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  piker
  I found the facts a bit hard to follow, but is his claim that they actually agreed to the accelerated vesting schedule, or that it was a drafting error? In the latter case, it's probably not just the statute of limitations that is blocking his claim in law or equity here.
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  simonebrunozzi
  > Then, in April 1996 - by which time I’d expatriated to the Kingdom of Tonga...This is why I still love California so much. The chance of things like this is just much higher than in any other place on Earth.
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  phonon
  Seems like you should sell your rights to the suit to a third party for a flat fee and percentage of recovery.
• TomGarden
  This was a fun read. Reminiscent of all the "I have bitcoin on a hard drive I misplaced" stories
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  swiftcoder
  These are always fun little what ifs. In 2012 I sold $50k in Amazon stock to pay off my student loans - a hilariously bad financial decision in retrospect, since the loans had capped interest rates, and that $50k of 2012 amazon stock would be worth over a million today...
• gchamonlive
  > NVIDIA did not dispute the authenticity of the option agreement, only that my claims were long since time-barred.Was this part of the agreement since the beginning or did they add this afterwards, and if so did they clearly communicate to you?
• anon
  undefined
• Traster
  I put this firmly in my category of "Bitcoin Millionaires". Well, yes, technically, if you had noticed at the time, and you had sued them and they had lost (which they might not, it seems he knew the paperwork was a mistake) then you would have had 9,375 more shares, and then if you'd kept them you'd have a billion dollars more worth of Nvidia stock.Here's a question though - you were given 15,625, so are you a billionare? Do you have those shares? Probably not. So what's makes you think that if you'd got those extra 9k shares you would've kept them?It's the same as the Bitcoin millionaires, yes, you had 50 bitcoin in 2012 you'd be rich now. But the vast majority of those people sold their bitcoin long before it went up (or bought a pizza with it) and a big chunk of those who didn't got Mt Goxed or BitFinxed or FTX'ed, or got hacked, or lost their hard disk with their private keys etc. etc. etc.
• amelius
  Well, better sell them because nvidia will be a victim of their own success. Who is going to write CUDA kernels if you can just ask AI to do it for you? At that point you might as well target different architectures.
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  throw03172019
  Don’t options expire (ex. Leaving the company)? How would this work thirty years later?
• anon
  undefined
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  andy_ppp
  So is there not a case for suing not for the shares but being told the wrong information at the time? It seems wrong to be mislead by a company who owes you shares in this way.
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  electriclove
  So the shares he did receive are worth well over $1B too right?
• refurb
  It took me a while to figure out what happened, but this is my understanding.1. OP was granted 25,000 options.2. OP was told by Nvidia their options had vested and they need to exercise. OP said ok, I’ll exercise.3. Nvidia made an error in stating the number of options (although the paperwork had the correct number), so only a portion were exercised.4. The remaining options expired as they were not exercised.So the legal argument is that Nvidia’s error in stating the number of options resulted in OP’s loss. However lawyers have told OP the statue of limitation on such a civil suit have passed thus no point in pursuing it.Is that it?
• comrade1234
  Options can be worthless I've had two friends whose options were clawed back. Exercise the options asap - harder to steal the stock back than the options.
• anon
  undefined
• jordanpg
  There's a Contracts prof reading this and writing a final exam question right now.
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  jesseab
  SS Vallejo, is that the old Alan Watts houseboat??
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  MiroslavPokorny
  Why not ask your friends to give you the equivalent stock today ?
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  eadwu
  Not sure how to feel about it.It seems like both you didn't caring about it during vesting or maybe they did a typo since it seems like you were vested over 4 years normally and the offer is over 4 years?Anyway if someone did this to me this is pretty much grounds for an irreparable relationship. Though I guess it was worth the attempt for $1b.
• darepublic
  The strong will survive. Ain't no love ain't no gratitude. Just leather jackets and zero sum game theory
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  nickdothutton
  If law was expressed as code then there wouldn't be a debate, the time limit would be explicit.
• jasonwatkinspdx
  I'll just say that I'm aware of instances where founders have used "clerical errors" in an attempt to trick departed employees from properly vesting their options.I don't have any inside info about this case obviously, but it's clear Nvidia would have ample motive to try to claw back whatever they could as mid 1996 was when they made their pivot after the disaster.Again, not throwing around accusations here, just saying it may not be as cut and dried as "it was just an oops but everyone forgot about it for 30 years."
• mrcwinn
  I don’t understand. How are they owed stock if they didn’t exercise? Options are not shares. They’re a contract to purchase shares.
• avazhi
  That’s how the statute of limitations works.Still massively sucks though. Not quite as bad as the guy who bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin but still a situation that would be impossible to ever get over.
• josefrichter
  You ought to sue. It's a matter of principle. It's bigger than you.
• rfgplk
  You shouldn't just go for the shares but also apply interest on it as well. They could (if my math is right) technically owe you 50-100k shares of then nvidia shares. Which would be a monstrous payday.
• locallost
  I'd chip in around $50 for a piece of the settlement :-).
• ekejjedjndbd
  If they exercises the rights would they have HODLd to now anyway prolly not. They might have $1m in SP500 index though or similar.
• jrflowers
  The title is missing an ‘n’. It is “Owned a billion dollars in Nvidia stock”. The author owned a billion dollars of Nvidia stock but did not own another, separate, billion dollars of Nvidia stock.
• anon
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• anon
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• max979
  Imagine being owed that when NVDA went parabolic. What a stressful, crazy waiting game that must've been.
• iririririr
  everyone judging the author but 1) i bet everyone in this forum has at least one bunch of stock from some startup that is going nowhere and they couldn't care less 2) very few people would have the Chutzpa to post such a story here, which was an awesome one to learn.
• Melatonic
  NOPE
• slopinthebag
  this is like finding your harddrive with 13,000 bitcoin but it's encrypted and you forgot the password
• moralestapia
  This is literally how easy it was for boomers to make 1Bn USD.Great story, thanks for sharing.
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  khazhoux
  Thanks for sharing, Eric.I learned a long time ago that everyone has a story of missed mega-riches in Silicon Valley. I have a few of my own :-)
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  dbg31415
  I bought a cup of coffee for ~10.5 Bitcoin back in April 2011.Where did it come from? Well, I was curious how Bitcoin worked, so I set up a little mining rig and let it run at night on my work computer. So, other than my time, which I think I did on work's time, and the power, which I think I used work's power... I saw it as a free cup of coffee.Honestly, I was just so happy to find a booth at a convention that actually took Bitcoin that I didn't mind the crappy exchange rate.But anyway, I don't think regret is a particularly useful thing to hold onto. You can regret things you did, and you can regret things you didn't do. Either way, there's nothing you can do about it. It feels like baggage. Hold on to too much of it and you sink. You have to find a way to rise above it and keep moving forward. If you don't, you'll drown.I say that as someone who learned this lesson the hard way.I spent 3+ years in a legal battle with an insurance company and their contractor that ultimately cost me more than $500,000. I was right. Period. I had been wronged. Period. The contractor and insurance company both lied and I had ample documentation of them doing so, and doing shoddy work. What I was asking for was completely reasonable. But who cares? That's not how the courts or the legal system work.What I learned from the process was that most people just get screwed over when they go up against big companies. And it's not even close. I'd guess something like 75% of people who get into a fight with an insurance company end up losing -- and it's probably higher than that if you factor in the people who simply give up. Eventually, you have to decide whether continuing to fight is worth what it's costing you.There will always be another "I almost caught the fish!" story to tell. Life is long. Learn from the mistakes, let go of the things you can't change, and do your best to keep moving forward.Some situations just suck. Best not to think about it them too much.
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  Eric_Gullichsen
  Author here. I wanted to share this piece of personal and technical history from the early days of 3D graphics. The article covers the meeting on my houseboat with Jensen, Curtis, and Chris in 1993, working on biquadratic texture mapping for the NV1, and how Microsoft’s sudden pivot to triangles in DirectX nearly broke the company before their pivot to the RIVA 128. It also digs into the paperwork anomaly I recently uncovered regarding my Technical Advisory Board options and the vesting schedule. Happy to answer any technical questions about the early 90s VR/graphics scene or the NV1 era!
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  imadierich
  9,375 × $0.05 = $468.75.So the dispute is basically over whether NVIDIA incorrectly prevented a guy from buying $468.75 worth of additional founder-era stock, which through NVIDIA's subsequent growth and splits became approximately $1 billion of stock thirty years later.
• 1saadcodes
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• justmeeew
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• varispeed
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• throw300away
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  jLaForest
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  goodmythical
  tl;drOP was not given all of the shares earned at the time decades ago and didn't realize that they should've been payed out, but after engaging in a lawsuit realized that the court would likely not grant the case give the statute of limitations.Kinda like all the Sony game 'owners' not carefully reasing the legally binding contracts they're always signing realizing that they are not in fact purchasing a gauranteed lifetime access to the game.
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  Voultapher
  > Then, in April 1996 - by which time I’d expatriated to the Kingdom of TongaIt annoys me every time I read the word expat and its derivatives. You became an immigrant, by emigrating to the Kingdom of Tonga. Only because you are white and rich doesn't change the concept of emigration to warrant a word with less stigma.Immigration is a tricky subject with many nuances, pretending otherwise i.e. driving the immigration = bad line and calling immigration that affects ourselves or that we don't find objectionable expatriation is disingenuous and hinders good quality discourse about the topic.
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  bilbo-b-baggins
  The astroturfing on this is insane.
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  wewewedxfgdf
  Big mistake.These matters are not purely legal nor purely right and wrong.They are personal and political too.This is a fight you should have fought.
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  MisterMunchkin
  It’s meaningless anyway because you spaffed them all away. The shares you had were enough for multi-generational wealth. The only reason you’re mad is because you want more money today to spaff. Had you been given the full amount back then, you’d still have nothing today.And if both parties intended for it to be vesting over four years and you both acted in line with that intention, then the written contract has been superseded by your actions.Eg You’ve worked there for 10 years, the contract you signed says you get paid 100k but you’ve both since sent letters agreeing to 150k and they’ve been paying you 150k the whole time. Would you accept them taking back 500k because of the original contract? Of course not, because you’ve both agreed to accept the new terms through your actions.