Early NVIDIA advisor says he is owed about a billion dollars in stock

Eric Gullichsen, an early technical advisor to NVIDIA, has published an account saying the company owes him roughly a billion dollars in stock. He traces the claim to the vesting terms of options granted to him in 1993, and says NVIDIA's position is that the claim is time-barred.

The 1993 options

Gullichsen writes that Jensen Huang invited him to join NVIDIA's Technical Advisory Board in 1993, after a meeting on his houseboat, the SS Vallejo, in Sausalito with Huang, Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky. According to his account, he was granted 25,000 options in September 1993, with vesting in quarterly installments so that all shares would vest one year from the grant date.

He also describes work with Priem around 1990, when Priem was the architect of the SPARCstation GX chip at Sun Microsystems, and says his fast implementation of biquadratic texture mapping drew Priem's interest. NVIDIA's first product, the NV1, shipped in 1995; in his telling, Microsoft's decision not to support quadratic texture mapping in DirectX hurt the company's finances.

The April 1996 letter

In April 1996, by which time Gullichsen had moved to the Kingdom of Tonga, NVIDIA's CFO wrote to him saying that 15,625 of his option shares had vested and that he was required to exercise them. He did, he says, and then forgot about the matter.

Thirty years later

In 2024, with news about NVIDIA on every screen, he went through a folder of old documents. According to the signed option agreement, he says, his options were meant to vest over four quarters, not four years, as NVIDIA's CFO and its outside counsel, Cooley, had asserted in 1996. By his math, 15,625 of 25,000 shares is 62.5%, what a four-year schedule would produce after ten quarters; on the one-year schedule the agreement specified, all 25,000 shares should have vested before the letter was written. With the stock's splits, which he puts at a cumulative 480x, his missing 9,375 shares would today be 4,500,000 shares.

Lawyers and the statute of limitations

Gullichsen says he hired Allan Steyer of Steyer Lowenthal and Chris Burke of Korein Tillery. After about a year of letters, he suggested the two sides meet to settle. NVIDIA did not dispute the authenticity of the option agreement, he writes, only that his claims were long since time-barred. The meeting was professional, he says, but Cooley's answer was in essence "so sue us".

He says he and his lawyers concluded the statute of limitations was against them: after thirty-odd years in which he "sat on his rights", the case was unlikely to survive a motion to dismiss. He closes with a line attributed to the Roman emperor Septimius Severus: "Omnia fui, nihil expedit."