Nvidia (NVDA) Faces $1.05 Billion Claim From 1993 Advisor Eric Gullichsen

The 1993 Grant Behind the Dispute

Eric Gullichsen, a virtual reality pioneer who advised the company before its public listing, says chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA) denied him 9,375 of the 25,000 stock options it granted him in 1993, a disputed slice now worth about $1.05 billion. The origins reach back to a Sausalito houseboat, where Nvidia's founders visited Gullichsen that year to review his graphics work. Chief executive Jensen Huang then invited him onto the company's Technical Advisory Board, and Huang's letter offered 25,000 options described as vesting over four years. A stock option is the right to buy shares later at a fixed price, and vesting is the schedule on which that right arrives.

The signed agreement Gullichsen has published reads differently: it vested in full one year from the grant date. In April 1996, Nvidia's finance chief wrote that only 15,625 options had vested, a count that matches ten quarters on a four-year clock. Gullichsen bought those shares and set the file aside. He says he reread the folder in 2024. On a one-year schedule, all 25,000 options should have vested decades earlier.

The arithmetic is stark. The stock has split 480-for-1 since the grant, so the missing 9,375 options now equal 4.5 million shares. At the record close of $233.95 on October 2, that position is worth roughly $1.05 billion. A widely shared post on X put the same stake at just over $1 billion, calling it a stock option mistake from 1993 that the company says came too late to fix.

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Time-Barred, Never Filed

According to the documents Gullichsen has made public, Nvidia never called his option paperwork fake. Its position was procedural: he was roughly 30 years too late. After he hired lawyers, a year of correspondence ended with Cooley, Nvidia's outside law firm, replying in effect that he should sue if he expects payment. “NVIDIA did not dispute the authenticity of the option agreement, only that my claims were long since time-barred,” Gullichsen wrote in an essay setting out his account.

Time-barred means the deadline to file suit has passed. California, where Nvidia is headquartered, generally allows four years to sue on a written contract, though his essay does not state which law he believes applies. His lawyers expected the case to be thrown out at an early stage, and no lawsuit was ever filed. Because no filing exists, there is no court record to test either side's reading of the documents.

Gullichsen framed the outcome bluntly: “Here in the land of the free, it turns out a company only has to honor its contractual obligations for a little while.” The scale at stake is easier to grasp in Nvidia's own long-run returns. A $1,000 stake at the company's IPO was worth about $8.39 million by the end of August, a figure that shows how far the disputed options have compounded since 1993.

$237.88 Resistance in Focus

COINOTAG data shows NVIDIA (NVDA) trading at $235.24, up 0.02% over 24 hours, inside a range of $234.38 to $235.30. The nearest ceiling sits at $237.88, where COINOTAG's composite scoring rates the level 85/100, drawing on the upper Bollinger Band, the R1 pivot and a Fibonacci level, about 1.7% above Friday's record close. On the downside, COINOTAG rates the $226.02 support at 70/100, where the Ichimoku Kijun, the 50-day EMA and a swing low converge. Momentum reads firm: the daily RSI sits at 67.4, the MACD signal is bullish and the trend is up, with perpetual open interest near $177.5 million. A push through $237.88 would confirm the strength behind the valuation at the heart of the claim; a break below $226.02 would invalidate it.