Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock

A tale of a man who was invited to join the Technical Advisory Board of NVIDIA in 1993 by Jensen, without realizing the significant financial impact it would have on him decades later. In September 1993, he was granted 25,000 options that were to vest over a period of one year from the Grant Date. When the NV1 finally shipped in 1995, Microsoft decided not to support quadratic texture mapping in their DirectX toolkit, causing a devastating effect on NVIDIA's finances and prospects.

In April 1996, NVIDIA's CFO wrote the man a letter stating that 15,625 shares of his stock options had vested, requiring him to exercise them. After expatriating to the Kingdom of Tonga, he forgot about it until 2024, when he dug through his folder of old documents. According to the duly signed option agreement, his options were meant to vest over four quarters, not four years, as NVIDIA claimed.

The math shows that 15,625 of 25,000 shares is 62.5%, which is what he expected after ten quarters of a four-year vesting schedule. With the stock's many splits, his missing 9,375 shares are now 4,500,000 shares. He engaged attorneys to explore the issue, but ultimately concluded that the statute of limitations was against him.