NVIDIA owes me a billion dollars in stock, but the statute of limitations has run out

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.

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.

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.

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?

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...

> 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.

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.