Comment by Eric_Gullichsen
17 hours ago
Ethically? Difficult question. I may not be a decent person as you posit, but I do like to think of myself as reasonable. I certainly never expected NVIDIA to say "aw shucks" and write me a billion dollar check. At the last lawyer meeting we proposed to settle for a far smaller number, which both sides agreed was reasonable. A number not picked out of a hat, but based on rather complex nuances such as the likelihood I would have sold etc.etc. derived from much legal thought. And they still made the call to say nope. I think it is perfectly clear from the options contract what the vesting term was. And certainly I erred in not realizing this earlier, before the statute of limitations tolled. Though in 1996 the stock was priced at 5 cents, so not something I paid enough attention to, not having the foresight or perhaps the necessary faith in Jensen's perseverance, intelligence, and luck. Hindsight is cheap.
A good framework would have been this: for the options you received, let's see what you did. Did you trade them 3 years later, resulting in $X amount? Then, let's assume you would have done the same with the missing stock options. I would guess that the amount would be really negligible - in the tens or hundreds of thousands, at most. Ethically, I think this is where I would consider it fair to both parties.
Then, you neglected this for ~30 years. It's fair to say that Nvidia doesn't owe you anything at this point.
Wouldn't be surprised if you weren't the only person with equity in nvidia around that time with similar paperwork errors, were that to be the case if word got around they settled with you, more people would start coming forward for the easy money.
If I were you I would refrain from offering thoughts like this publicly. You don't want to hav any of this used against you.
It is clear he has decided to not pursue this any further.
That doesn’t mean we should encourage him.