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Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock

1091 points · 458 comments · Eric_Gullichsen

  1. klausa · · focus · HN ↗
    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!

    1. piker · · focus · HN ↗
      Yes. I noted this below. A lot of times you see a decimal point in the wrong place and the courts don't just say "oh well, I guess it's a billion then!"

      The rulings are fact-specific, but clearly both parties here had a mutual understanding that the paper was only meant to reflect.

      1. 59percentmore · · focus · HN ↗
        I think you could forgive people for thinking so, in a society where people get sent to prison for decades on the subjective read of technicalities (and subsequently released early when advocacy bashes the government's head against its own injustice for long enough; of course, at that point, the judge is retired or dead and the prosecutor has had a long, successful career, so everyone wins! /s).

        Same for contracts where the written language is absurd, and the agreement one party claims without the necessary evidence is way more reasonable, and the court finds in favor of the absurd contract.

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