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Comment by philipallstar

16 hours ago

> A modest inflation-adjusted multiple of the original value of the options seems reasonable.

But why? The OP (apparently) owns some of Nvidia. It seems reasonable to get that ownership recognised.

The simple reason is that if we allow litigating over ownership based on 30-year-old facts, nothing is ever settled. Maybe your house, with its 30 year mortgage paid off, actually belongs to someone else. Maybe that kid you shoved in 3rd grade comes back 40 years later and asserts their lifelong earnings were reduced by $100m because of the trauma.

The statute of limitations regime exists to provide stability. If you are harmed, you have some amount of time to make a claim.

Doing away with the statute of limitations would result in more injustice, not less.

While not a letter of the law argument, there's a spirit of the law argument here that comes from the ideas like adverse posession and the statute of limitations. The OP didn't use or even worry about the options/shares for 30 some years: the time to speak up and assert ownership was literal decades ago.

If someone has built a house on a remote lot you claim to own, while making property improvements and paying taxes, but you've never visited for 30 years; are you really entitled to swoop in and seize their house now?

  • In civil law countries, you would be. That's why Europe has the reputation for being tangled in bureaucracy. Every possible risk has to be discharged before you can do anything at all.

  • Physical land is quite different. And if squatting is legal, it makes a kind of tax of ownership and also means that any registry is invalid.

    If you are saying the physical house only and not the land that is different yes. Someone who can move the house obviously should still own the house. Trespassing usually doesn't invalidate ownership of all your belongings.

    More important is the meta concept of like we write confusing contracts and then execute them and we agree on an end date (all transactions done) and then informally and implicitly we agree that if anything was wrong you only have z years after close date to fix it.

    This is kind of thing where big people can do it themselves and other people perhaps need a regulated entity to review their docs ... Like mortgages and what not.

    The interesting thing here would be if the IRS decides to have an opinion ...

  • > ; are you really entitled to swoop in and seize their house now?

    In the country i am, yes. If you have the paperwork.

  • Yes, you are entitled. This has been a big point of contention in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. A lot of the property was nationalized, their former owners defected, and then the heirs came back decades later requesting their property back. In some cases where there was a house, there was now a 15-story building.

    Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi

  • One man's negligence is another man's HODL... Buying and holding an asset is a completely sound investment strategy.

  • I dont think the land ownership analogy is quite as simple as you're making it out to be, given that the US and many other countries are literally founded on "someone else's land" and the entire Palestine / Israel issue.

    • The US is not founded on 'someone else's land'. Small portions of the US perhaps, yes, and treaties and courts work through that. Most Indians were hunter/gatherers, and suggesting that because someone roves through massive tracts of land is ownership, is beyond weird.

      Seasonal camping sites make sense, more from a 'our land' perspective.

      And naturally any signed treaties should be honoured.

      You may say "But, they were here first!", yet that's quite false. Native Americans invaded as well, either subsuming or slaughtering existing populations as they did so. Further, Native Americans warred, fought, killed each other, just as Europeans, Middle Easterners, and everyone else on the planet did. After all, human is human is human, and that's (sadly) what humans do.

      And if you look at every other country on the planet, the precise same is true. Locals pushed aside as newcomers invaded, whether the UK, Scotland, Russia, Germany, the Middle East, literally every place on the planet.

      There is no peoples, no country, no ethic group, which has not over time invaded another.

      There is no one alive today, that does not stand on land once called 'home' by another.

      You may wonder why I say this, but instead of discussing a land plot inside a Western country taken over by another citizen, you immediately dove into Native American rights and a Middle Eastern conflict for some inexplicable reason.

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