Ex-Nvidia adviser says he's owed $1bn in stock - but the story has some large gaps
A 1993 contractor's tale of a mis-vested options grant has gone viral, but the maths only works if you don't ask what happened to the shares he already cashed in.
The pitch
Eric Gullichsen, an early technical adviser to Nvidia back when Jensen Huang still wore a normal jacket, says the company owes him roughly a billion dollars in stock. His account, published on his own blog, has spent the past few days doing the rounds on Hacker News, racking up hundreds of points and comments.
The bones of the story are genuinely charming: houseboat meetings in Sausalito, a biquadratic texture-mapping patent, a demo at the Guggenheim, and a slice of very early Nvidia history that predates the leather jacket entirely. Gullichsen says he was granted 25,000 stock options in September 1993, meant - according to the paperwork he’s kept - to vest fully within one year. Instead, Nvidia’s CFO told him in 1996 that only 15,625 shares (62.5%) had vested, consistent with a four-year schedule rather than the one-year term he says the contract actually specified.
What’s actually being claimed
Run the maths on the disputed 9,375 shares through Nvidia’s cumulative 480x split history and you land somewhere near the billion-dollar figure in the headline. That’s the entire basis of the claim: a documents-based dispute over vesting terms from three decades ago, inflated to modern value by one of the most dramatic stock run-ups in corporate history.
Crucially, none of this has been tested by a court. Gullichsen writes that he hired lawyers - Allan Steyer and Chris Burke, working on contingency - who spent roughly a year in correspondence with Nvidia’s counsel. There’s no ruling, no settlement figure, and no confirmation from Nvidia. In the Hacker News thread, Gullichsen himself says the two sides had discussed settling for “a far smaller number” than a billion, which rather undercuts the framing of the headline.
The elephant in the post
The most pointed pushback, both on the thread and simply from doing the arithmetic, concerns the shares Gullichsen did receive. He exercised 15,625 vested shares in 1996. Commenters worked out that, had he held onto those rather than the disputed 9,375, they’d now be worth even more than the sum he says he’s owed - somewhere around $1.7 billion. Gullichsen’s post doesn’t say what happened to that original stake, and he hasn’t answered the question directly beyond confirming he “forgot all about” the options for nearly 30 years.
So who’s actually affected
Nobody, right now. This is a personal contractual dispute between one former adviser and Nvidia, not a shareholder issue, not a class action, and not something that touches Nvidia’s operations, products or ordinary punters holding NVDA in a pension fund. There is no confirmed billion-dollar liability on Nvidia’s books, and no legal finding that the 1996 vesting calculation was wrong.
The takeaway
It’s a fun bit of Silicon Valley folklore - real early involvement, a real disputed document, and genuinely eye-watering hypothetical numbers once you run 1993 options through 30 years of stock splits. But “I believe I’m owed a billion dollars” and “a court has ordered Nvidia to pay a billion dollars” are very different headlines, and right now only the first one is true. Worth watching if it ever reaches a filing with actual legal weight; not worth treating as established fact until it does.