You should sell your right to litigate this. There are hundreds of firms that would pay you to take this on. Would involve near zero effort for you and would also check the box of being “about the principle”.
They don't own the stock as I understand it but never received options which they should have and would have been able to exercise. I assume they sold the remainder of the options long ago otherwise they have $3b in NVDA already and probably wouldn't have written this post.
They do not own the stock, because the option never vested (even though it was supposed to) and it was never exercised. The time to assert that claim was 30 years ago.
Plethora of reasons, but right to title is not as black and white as anyone assumes. There is no govt ledger that keeps track of who owns what, everything is always subject to interpretation. If you own a home, you likely had to purchase title insurance. If you don’t know what that’s for, look it up. It will give you the same answer to this question.
OP was not given all of the shares earned at the time decades ago and didn't realize that they should've been payed out, but after engaging in a lawsuit realized that the court would likely not grant the case give the statute of limitations.
Kinda like all the Sony game 'owners' not carefully reasing the legally binding contracts they're always signing realizing that they are not in fact purchasing a gauranteed lifetime access to the game.
Author here. I wanted to share this piece of personal and technical history from the early days of 3D graphics. The article covers the meeting on my houseboat with Jensen, Curtis, and Chris in 1993, working on biquadratic texture mapping for the NV1, and how Microsoft’s sudden pivot to triangles in DirectX nearly broke the company before their pivot to the RIVA 128.
It also digs into the paperwork anomaly I recently uncovered regarding my Technical Advisory Board options and the vesting schedule. Happy to answer any technical questions about the early 90s VR/graphics scene or the NV1 era!
You should sell your right to litigate this. There are hundreds of firms that would pay you to take this on. Would involve near zero effort for you and would also check the box of being “about the principle”.
Would they? Surely they'd realize that they too have no chance of winning because of the same issue.
Seems like you should sell your rights to the suit to a third party for a flat fee and percentage of recovery.
Just commented the same thing and agree 100%.
Don’t options expire (ex. Leaving the company)? How would this work thirty years later?
Why does a stockholder have to reassert their rights to hold the stock that they already own?
They don't own the stock as I understand it but never received options which they should have and would have been able to exercise. I assume they sold the remainder of the options long ago otherwise they have $3b in NVDA already and probably wouldn't have written this post.
They do not own the stock, because the option never vested (even though it was supposed to) and it was never exercised. The time to assert that claim was 30 years ago.
Plethora of reasons, but right to title is not as black and white as anyone assumes. There is no govt ledger that keeps track of who owns what, everything is always subject to interpretation. If you own a home, you likely had to purchase title insurance. If you don’t know what that’s for, look it up. It will give you the same answer to this question.
So the shares he did receive are worth well over $1B too right?
this is like finding your harddrive with 13,000 bitcoin but it's encrypted and you forgot the password
tl;dr
OP was not given all of the shares earned at the time decades ago and didn't realize that they should've been payed out, but after engaging in a lawsuit realized that the court would likely not grant the case give the statute of limitations.
Kinda like all the Sony game 'owners' not carefully reasing the legally binding contracts they're always signing realizing that they are not in fact purchasing a gauranteed lifetime access to the game.
Correction: The writer chose not to engage a lawsuit after receiving advice it was likely to be dismissed given 30 years had passed.
Author here. I wanted to share this piece of personal and technical history from the early days of 3D graphics. The article covers the meeting on my houseboat with Jensen, Curtis, and Chris in 1993, working on biquadratic texture mapping for the NV1, and how Microsoft’s sudden pivot to triangles in DirectX nearly broke the company before their pivot to the RIVA 128. It also digs into the paperwork anomaly I recently uncovered regarding my Technical Advisory Board options and the vesting schedule. Happy to answer any technical questions about the early 90s VR/graphics scene or the NV1 era!