alt Hacker NewsOwed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock
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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 according to his math.
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 remaining shares too.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
This guy has had some interesting side quests.
https://time.com/archive/6735546/hes-the-master-of-his-domai...
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.
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”.
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.
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.
To satisfy the curious, "I have been everything, and nothing is worth it."
Well quoted.
> Then, in April 1996 - by which time I’d expatriated to the Kingdom of Tonga and was working on various internet startup schemes
Why 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".
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.
Why does a stockholder have to reassert their rights to hold the stock that they already own?
Seems like you should sell your rights to the suit to a third party for a flat fee and percentage of recovery.
The strong will survive. Ain't no love ain't no gratitude. Just leather jackets and zero sum game theory
If law was expressed as code then there wouldn't be a debate, the time limit would be explicit.
Don’t options expire (ex. Leaving the company)? How would this work thirty years later?
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.
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.
> Then, in April 1996 - by which time I’d expatriated to the Kingdom of Tonga
It 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.
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.
Why not ask your friends to give you the equivalent stock today ?
So the shares he did receive are worth well over $1B too right?
I'd chip in around $50 for a piece of the settlement :-).
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
If they exercises the rights would they have HODLd to now anyway prolly not. They might have $1m in SP500 index though or similar.
NOPE
tl;dr
OP 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.
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.
This is literally how easy it was for boomers to make 1Bn USD.
Great story, thanks for sharing.
this is like finding your harddrive with 13,000 bitcoin but it's encrypted and you forgot the password
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 :-)
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!
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.
[dead]
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.
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!