You should sell your right to litigate this. There are hundreds of firms that would pay you to take this on. Would involve near zero effort for you and would also check the box of being “about the principle”.
There’s already a relatively liquid market here around legal financing, but they only finance cases that can win. This is not a case that will result in anything but a dismissal.
Why would anyone buy that right? Statute of limitations is crystal clear here. You can’t sue someone because they owed you money 30 years ago and you never followed up.
It seems like both you didn't caring about it during vesting or maybe they did a typo since it seems like you were vested over 4 years normally and the offer is over 4 years?
Anyway if someone did this to me this is pretty much grounds for an irreparable relationship. Though I guess it was worth the attempt for $1b.
They don't own the stock as I understand it but never received options which they should have and would have been able to exercise. I assume they sold the remainder of the options long ago otherwise they have $3b in NVDA already and probably wouldn't have written this post.
Plethora of reasons, but right to title is not as black and white as anyone assumes. There is no govt ledger that keeps track of who owns what, everything is always subject to interpretation. If you own a home, you likely had to purchase title insurance. If you don’t know what that’s for, look it up. It will give you the same answer to this question.
Also seems like it isn’t clear that they ever owned it. There appears to be a mistake in the contract asserting mutually inconsistent clauses, but it appears that both parties agreed on the not-owning interpretation for nearly 30 years, which might already be a far simpler contract resolution (depending on jurisdiction, it can almost immediately binding as soon as both parties accent to that reading) than also having waited out the statute of limitations
They do not own the stock, because the options never vested (even though they were supposed to) and were never exercised. The time to assert that claim was 30 years ago.
OP was not given all of the shares earned at the time decades ago and didn't realize that they should've been payed out, but after engaging in a lawsuit realized that the court would likely not grant the case give the statute of limitations.
Kinda like all the Sony game 'owners' not carefully reasing the legally binding contracts they're always signing realizing that they are not in fact purchasing a gauranteed lifetime access to the game.
Author here. I wanted to share this piece of personal and technical history from the early days of 3D graphics. The article covers the meeting on my houseboat with Jensen, Curtis, and Chris in 1993, working on biquadratic texture mapping for the NV1, and how Microsoft’s sudden pivot to triangles in DirectX nearly broke the company before their pivot to the RIVA 128.
It also digs into the paperwork anomaly I recently uncovered regarding my Technical Advisory Board options and the vesting schedule. Happy to answer any technical questions about the early 90s VR/graphics scene or the NV1 era!
The Kingdom of Tonga stood out to me. Are you still there? Why were you there? It's a very interesting place, especially for anyone not from there. I'm only adjacently aware as someone who spent most of my life in a different Polynesian country.
It seems like both you didn't caring about it during vesting or maybe they did a typo since it seems like you were vested over 4 years normally and the offer is over 4 years?
Anyway if someone did this to me this is pretty much grounds for an irreparable relationship. Though I guess it was worth the attempt for $1b.
OP was not given all of the shares earned at the time decades ago and didn't realize that they should've been payed out, but after engaging in a lawsuit realized that the court would likely not grant the case give the statute of limitations.
Kinda like all the Sony game 'owners' not carefully reasing the legally binding contracts they're always signing realizing that they are not in fact purchasing a gauranteed lifetime access to the game.