Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock
- ID
- 29198
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 28 Sep 2026, 10:05 AM
- Fetched
- 28 Sep 2026, 12:16 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://colo.to/nvidia-stock-narrative.html
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.0
- Created
- 28 Sep 2026, 12:16 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- saas_foundersdevelopers
What happened
Eric Gullichsen writes that he was granted 25,000 NVIDIA options in September 1993 as an early advisor, exercised 15,625 shares in April 1996 after a CFO letter, and later found the signed agreement indicated vesting over four quarters rather than four years. He claims the remaining shares are now worth about a billion dollars, according to the post's title. The Hacker News thread has 211 points and 105 comments.
Why it matters
For founders and early employees, the concrete lesson is to keep the signed option agreement and exercise records, because this dispute turns on 15,625 versus 25,000 shares and a four-quarter versus four-year vesting interpretation—not on what a CFO or outside counsel later asserted. No Malaysian or Southeast Asian impact is stated in the text.
Discussion angle
What would you check in your own option grant after reading this—the original vesting clause, exercise notices, or cap-table records—and would you trust a company's later legal summary over the signed agreement?