In 1993, Nvidia gave an early advisor 25,000 stock options. He now says the company shorted him 9,375 of them, a slice worth about $1.05 billion today.
Nvidia never called his paperwork fake, he says. It argued he was 30 years too late.
A Houseboat Demo and a Letter From Jensen Huang
The advisor is Eric Gullichsen, a virtual reality pioneer. In 1993, Nvidia’s founders visited his Sausalito houseboat to see his graphics work.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, invited him onto its Technical Advisory Board. Huang’s letter offered 25,000 options that “vests over 4 years.”
A stock option is the right to buy shares later at a fixed price. Vesting is the timetable for getting that right.
The signed option agreement said something else. Gullichsen quotes it vesting fully “upon the expiration of one year from Grant Date.”
In April 1996, Nvidia’s finance chief wrote that only 15,625 options had vested. That matches 10 quarters on a four-year clock.
Gullichsen bought those shares and forgot about them.
Why the $1 Billion Claim Never Reached a Judge
In 2024, he reread the folder. On a one-year clock, all 25,000 options should have vested.
The stock has split 480-for-1 since then, he says. The missing 9,375 options now equal 4.5 million shares. At Friday’s $233.95 close, set on the day of a new record high, that is about $1.05 billion.
He hired lawyers. After a year of letters, Nvidia’s outside law firm, Cooley, answered in effect “so sue us.”
“NVIDIA did not dispute the authenticity of the option agreement, only that my claims were long since time-barred,” Gullichsen wrote in an essay.
Time-barred means the deadline to sue has passed. California, where Nvidia is headquartered, generally allows four years for written contracts. His essay does not say which law applied.
His lawyers expected the case to be thrown out early. No lawsuit was filed.
A $1,000 stake at Nvidia’s IPO was worth about $8.39 million by late August, BeInCrypto’s biggest IPO returns study found.
“Here in the land of the free, it turns out a company only has to honor its contractual obligations for a little while,” Gullichsen remarked.
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