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  • Hacker News
  • This guy has had some interesting side quests.

    https://time.com/archive/6735546/hes-the-master-of-his-domai...

    by neom
  • As this is an interesting story I think we need a change to HN algorithm.

    The title is misleading, they don’t owe him.

    The story is NVIDIA made a mistake and OP tried to exploit it and failed and is now grabbing another straw with that post.

    It was not intentional shares to his or Nvidia’s understanding.

    Everybody reading the actual story would not just upvote this.

    The upvotes must be simple big corp hate +misleading title

    by jwpapi
  • You are ultimately responsible for asserting your contractual rights. Your stock options had an expiry and you did not exercise them in time. The letter you received notifying that you had 15,625 vested options was not an award in of itself, it was only a courtesy notifying you that you had vested options to exercise before they expired. Even if due to ambiguous wording it could be argued that 25,000 options had vested at the time instead of 15,625, that was only relevant until the options expired. You needed to assert your rights to the [additional 9,375] vested options before they expired. So, this issue died in 1996.

    I had a similar experience although over a shorter time horizon. I was in a dispute with a corporation which prompted me to pore over every word in every previously signed agreement. I discovered, due to an obvious typo in a stock option agreement, more options had vested than had been intended. After some pushback, they eventually relented and awarded me the options.

    Given the amount of money involved, it was worth engaging lawyers to see if NVIDIA would pay you some money to save the hassle of dealing with it, but there is and was zero prospect of this ever being awarded in your favor by a court since the options expired.

    by reticulates
  • The angle I haven't heard, yet I think would make the most sense, is that you both understood the agreement correctly, at the time.

    Somebody did the paperwork wrong, but paperwork isn't the agreement. You agreed what you agreed, thought everything was in order, and then discovered an error in the documents.

    It doesn't seem like there's a claim here.

    by lordnacho
  • > Here in the land of the free, it turns out a company only has to honor its contractual obligations for a little while.

    If Nvidia showed you contract paperwork that proved they overpaid you 9,375 shares in 1993, would you agree to pay them back the present value? After all contracts should be enforceable indefinitely right?

    by binlog
  • Author here. Thanks for all the comments, I've been hesitant to post this to the court of public opinion, yet curiosity about what the HN community would think caused me to push the button. My lawyers - who were really excellent - represented me (on contingency!) because it seemed the chance of a judge not accepting a motion to dismiss (for a variety of reasons I don't want to detail here) was non-zero. And the process of discovery would be very costly for NVIDIA with depositions from many executives who have better things to do.
    by Eric_Gullichsen
  • An open question is what happened to the 15,625 shares that he received when he exercised his options in 1996?

    If he had held on to those, they would be worth even more than the additional 9,375 shares he was entitled to -- about $1.7 billion using the same numbers in the post.

    My guess is that he probably sold them when they were worth a lot less then they are now, and would have done the same with the additional shares too.

    by jonas21
  • I feel like I'm going crazy reading the comments, and I guess, big props to the author for writing this in a way that pulls it off.

    The issue here is, IMHO, not "Nvidia owes me stock in an ironclad way and gets away with it because of statue of limitations", but "I accepted an offer from Nvidia but the paperwork between the offer and the options grant differed in a way that both benefits me, and nobody noticed or cared about until now".

    The original offer was for 25k shares, vesting over 4 years.

    The options paperwork says 25k shares, vesting over 4 _quarters_.

    Now, I'm not a lawyer, and certainly not a securities lawyer, but that seems like it could be reasonably chalked down to a clerical error on the options paperwork? "You made a mistake and now I can get a billion dollars more than we agreed to originally" doesn't feel like a great lawsuit!

    by klausa

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