Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock

Eric Gullichsen recounts being an early technical adviser to NVIDIA in 1993 and receiving a grant of 25,000 stock options that, by the signed agreement, were supposed to vest over one year (four quarterly installments). He describes technical work with founders Curtis Priem and others - porting his biquadratic texture-mapping implementation to prototype NVIDIA hardware and demonstrating it publicly - and explains how Microsoft’s decision to support only triangles in early DirectX hurt NVIDIA’s NV1 product. In April 1996 NVIDIA’s CFO informed him that 15,625 options had vested and required exercise; Gullichsen exercised those but later found the grant language actually called for complete vesting within a year, meaning 9,375 options were never honored. After cumulative stock splits, those missing options would now correspond to about 4.5 million shares.

Gullichsen retained prominent litigators, exchanged letters with NVIDIA’s in-house and outside counsel, and proposed a settlement meeting; NVIDIA did not dispute the grant’s authenticity but asserted the claim was time-barred. His attorneys concluded a lawsuit would likely be dismissed on statute-of-limitations grounds, so he dropped further action. He presents the episode as a cautionary tale about losing rights through delay, remains amused and philosophical about the outcome, and asks whether others have discovered similar vesting surprises.