Ex-Nvidia advisor says the company owes him $1 billion in stock, but Nvidia disagrees

A reported 1996 paperwork error miscounted his vesting period as four years instead of four quarters

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Through the looking glass: In a stunning blog post published this week, tech entrepreneur and virtual reality pioneer, Eric Gullichsen, claimed that Nvidia owes him roughly $1 billion in stock due to a gross miscalculation more than 30 years ago. Gullichsen served on Nvidia's Technical Advisory Board from September 1993 to April 1996.

According to Gullichsen, he was granted 25,000 stock options in 1993 after demonstrating his fast implementation of biquadratic texture mapping to Nvidia co-founders Jensen Huang and Curtis Priem, technology detailed in a US patent on which he is a named inventor.

However, when he left the company in April 1996, only 15,625 options had vested instead of 25,000, a shortfall he attributes to an error in the paperwork.

By Gullichsen's calculations, the 9,375 options that never vested would be worth more than $1 billion today after cumulative 480x stock splits over the past three decades. Following the splits, those 9,000-odd options would have ballooned to around 4.5 million shares, each worth around $230 as of September 29, 2026.

Gullichsen said he realized the decades-old mistake in 2024 after sifting through old documents as Nvidia's stock surged amid the AI boom. Nvidia has since become the first company to hit a $5 trillion valuation. According to him, the documents show that his options were meant to vest over four quarters, not four years, so all 25,000 should have vested well before he parted ways with Nvidia.

Instead, he says, the vesting period was treated as four years rather than four quarters, so only 62.5% of his options had vested after ten quarters, leaving him shortchanged by more than 9,000 shares. According to Gullichsen, "On the one-year schedule the agreement actually specified, all 25,000 shares should have vested" well before April 1996.

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Gullichsen acknowledges that Huang's original invitation letter stated that his options would vest over four years. However, the option agreement itself, dated September 1993, specified quarterly installments vesting fully within a year, and it reportedly states that it supersedes prior written agreements, seemingly overriding Huang's letter. A letter from then-CFO Marcel Gani in April 1996, which counted 15,625 options as vested, is consistent with the four-year schedule.

Gullichsen says he hired attorneys who exchanged letters with Nvidia's in-house and outside counsel for about a year. The company reportedly did not dispute the authenticity of the options agreement, but when a settlement was proposed, it maintained that his claims were "time-barred" and turned the offer down.

Gullichsen added that he considered suing Nvidia but concluded, together with his attorneys, that the case would likely be dismissed because the statute of limitations had long passed.

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