Through the mirror: In a stunning blog post published this week, tech entrepreneur and virtual reality pioneer Eric Gullichsen claimed that Nvidia owes him around $1 billion in shares due to a gross miscalculation more than 30 years ago. Gullichsen was a member of 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 to Nvidia co-founders Jensen Huang and Curtis Priem his rapid implementation of biquadratic texture mapping, a technology described in a U.S. patent of which he is named the inventor.
However, when he left the company in April 1996, only 15,625 options had vested instead of 25,000, which he attributed to an error in the documents.
By Gullichsen’s calculations, the 9,375 options that never vested would be worth more than $1 billion today after cumulative 480-fold stock splits over the past three decades. After the split, these approximately 9,000 options would have grown to approximately 4.5 million shares on September 29, 2026, each worth approximately $230.
Gullichsen said he recognized the decades-old mistake in 2024 after looking through old documents as Nvidia shares soared amid the AI boom. Nvidia has since become the first company to reach a $5 trillion valuation. According to him, the documents show that his options were supposed to vest over four quarters, not four years, so all 25,000 should have vested well before his separation from Nvidia.
Instead, he says, the vesting period was treated as four years rather than four quarters, so only 62.5% of his options vested after ten quarters, leaving him with a backlog of more than 9,000 shares. According to Gullichsen, “under the one-year schedule actually provided for in the agreement, all 25,000 shares should have vested well before April 1996.”
Gullichsen acknowledges that Huang’s original invitation letter stated that his options were valid for a period of four years. However, the option agreement itself, dated September 1993, set quarterly installments that could be fully vested within a year and reportedly stated that it superseded previous written agreements and appeared to override Huang’s letter. An April 1996 letter from then-CFO Marcel Gani counting 15,625 options as vested is consistent with the four-year plan.
Gullichsen says he hired lawyers who exchanged letters with Nvidia’s internal and external lawyers for about a year. The company reportedly did not dispute the authenticity of the option agreement, but when a settlement was proposed, it insisted that its claims were “barred” and rejected the offer.
Gullichsen added that he considered suing Nvidia, but along with his lawyers concluded that the case would likely be dismissed because the statute of limitations had long since expired.
