An early advisor to Nvidia has published a first-person account claiming he is owed about a billion dollars in stock, after discovering a discrepancy in the vesting schedule of his 1993 option grant that only came to light three decades later.
Eric Gullichsen writes in a post on colo.to that he was invited by Jensen Huang onto Nvidia's Technical Advisory Board in September 1993 and received 25,000 options that, according to the signed agreement, were to vest in quarterly installments within one year.
What the Nvidia option agreement said
Gullichsen says his work with Nvidia founder Curtis Priem on biquadratic texture mapping drew the founders to his houseboat, the SS Vallejo, in Sausalito, where the idea found its way into the company's first product, the NV1.
In April 1996, after the NV1's commercial troubles, Nvidia's CFO wrote to him stating that 15,625 shares had vested and asking him to exercise them. Gullichsen did so and forgot the matter.
He says a 2024 look through old documents showed the agreement had specified a one-year vesting period, not the four-year schedule that 15,625 of 25,000 shares — 62.5 percent, or ten quarters — implies.
Why the billion-dollar Nvidia stock claim stalled
After 30 years of stock splits, which Gullichsen cites as a cumulative 480x, the missing 9,375 shares would have become about 4,500,000 shares, which he describes as a handsome pile worth roughly a billion dollars at current prices.
He hired attorneys Allan Steyer of Steyer Lowenthal and Chris Burke of Korein Tillery, who exchanged letters with Nvidia's in-house and outside counsel for about a year.
Gullichsen writes that Nvidia did not dispute the authenticity of the signed option agreement, only that his claims were long since time-barred. A meeting was held with professionalism, but according to his account, the outside counsel effectively told him to sue.
