A former member of Nvidia's Technical Advisory Board says the company owes him roughly $1.01 billion in stock, and he says Nvidia turned down a settlement offer to resolve the 31-year-old dispute.

Eric Gullichsen, granted 25,000 stock options in September 1993, lays out the claim in a blog post titled "owed a billion dollars in NVDA stock." He argues that his grant was meant to vest fully in one year, not four. An April 1996 letter from then-CFO Marcel Gani counted only 15,625 vested shares. The remaining 9,375 options, after Nvidia's combined 480x stock splits, would have become about 4.5 million shares. At Nvidia's September 25 close of $225.07, that stake is worth about $1.01 billion — matching his "about a billion dollars" figure.

Those 9,375 disputed options would have cost Gullichsen $468.75 to exercise in 1996.

Two documents, two schedules

The core of the dispute is a contradiction between two documents from Nvidia's earliest days. The option grant, dated September 9, 1993 and signed for Nvidia by CEO Jensen Huang, covers grant No. 7 of 25,000 shares. Its cover sheet states: "All shares shall vest upon the expiration of one year from Grant Date" — meaning full vesting by September 9, 1994 — with 25% vesting at three months and the rest quarterly, four times within the year.

A separate, undated invitation letter, also signed by Huang, describes "a stock option of 25,000 which vests over 4 years." The arithmetic supports the four-year reading: 15,625 is 62.5% of 25,000, or 10 of 16 quarters, matching the September 9, 1993 to April 16, 1996 timeline. The CFO's count fits the four-year quarterly schedule.

The signed cover sheet, however, contains two provisions that cut in Nvidia's favor. It states that any discrepancy with its attached legal provisions "shall be governed by the attached legal provisions" — and those attachments are not included in Gullichsen's post. It also says it supersedes prior written agreements, which would override the invitation letter.

Gani's April 16, 1996 exercise letter ended Gullichsen's "contractual relationship with NVIDIA and Its Technical Board of Advisors" and stated he held "15,625 shares of NVIDIA stock options vested." The exercise price was $0.05 a share with 90 days to exercise — $781.25 for a full exercise. That window closed around July 15, 1996.

Settlement rejected

Gullichsen discovered the possible discrepancy in 2024 while re-reading the grant. He hired lawyers who worked on contingency, according to one of his replies in a related discussion thread. After about a year of letters between his team and Nvidia's in-house and outside counsel, the two sides met. "We proposed to settle for a far smaller number," he wrote, but Nvidia "still made the call to say nope."

His legal position is weak. Gullichsen says he and his counsel agreed the statute of limitations worked against him and that "it seemed unlikely we'd make it past a motion to dismiss." He and his lawyers concluded that after "thirty-odd years" the case may be too far past its prime. Nvidia has not publicly responded.

From texture mapping to the NV1

Gullichsen's connection to Nvidia predates the grant dispute. He worked on VR projects from the late 1980s through his company Sense8, co-founded around 1990. That work produced a fast implementation of biquadratic texture mapping, which he says caught the attention of Nvidia co-founder Curtis Priem in 1993. Priem then brought Jensen Huang and co-founder Chris Malachowsky to Gullichsen's houseboat in Sausalito for a demo.

He is a named inventor on a 1994 patent filing, "Wide-angle image dewarping method and apparatus" (US5796426A), which names "the NV-1 chip sold by N-Vidia Corporation" as a hardware example. The NV1 was not commercially successful but used quadratic surfaces as its basic primitive.

Commenters asked what happened to his existing shares; Gullichsen had not answered as of Monday morning. His own settlement reasoning included "the likelihood I would have sold" — the same calculation another Nvidia investor, Stanley Druckenmiller, made when he sold before the 10-to-1 split.

Nvidia has since become, at least temporarily, the most valuable company in the world, and the stock's rise has minted many employee millionaires. Gullichsen's advice to anyone holding equity paperwork from those years: "Read the contracts. Carefully."

With the statute of limitations expired, the exercise window closed in July 1996, and the superseding legal provisions unpublished, Gullichsen's billion-dollar claim now rests almost entirely on whether Nvidia decides the reputational cost of silence outweighs the cost of another look at grant No. 7.