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Comment by lquist | Hacker News Reader

Why does a stockholder have to reassert their rights to hold the stock that they already own?

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.

And if they sold the others, had they been given the additional shares, they would have very likely sold those too. So even if everything went correctly, nothing of substance would have changed. It only looks that way in a mythical history with perfect hindsight, where the stock was held for 30 years.

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 and thus were never exercised. The time to assert that claim was 30 years ago.

> NVIDIA’s CFO wrote me a letter stating that 15,625 shares of my stock options had vested, and that I was required to exercise them. I did, and then forgot all about it.

Read the whole thing again. They aren’t complaining about the 15,625 shares (which they presumably sold a long time ago) but the remaining 25,000–15,625.

"NVIDIA’s CFO wrote me a letter stating that 15,625 shares of my stock options had vested, and that I was required to exercise them. I did, and then forgot all about it."

Normally this is a right to buy at a given price. If he was billed for it, then there is very little chance NVIDIA can weasel they way out ot it. I suspect he never paid for the shares.

Those shares were fine, it was the other 9,375 that were in question here.

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