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”.
1. Time barring is pretty iron clad. Sucks for the author but consider the alternative where anyone could sue anyone after any period of time.
2. If a court did find in favor of the plaintiff, the court would be more likely to award the 90s cash value of the stock, plus interest, rather than awarding the shares or current market value (damages being how he was actually wronged in the 90s rather than speculating what he might have done with the stock to present)
3. Given 1 and 2, Nvidia is unlikely to make a big settlement, meaning an expensive and risky trial.
Which brings us to hidden reason #4: nobody would pay that much for the rights so it probably isn't worth the author's time. He'd still be the man at the center of the suit: depositions, testimony, cross examination, records subpoenas...
What's the problem with this alternative, exactly? Some crimes already have no statute of limitations, and this hasn't caused the sky to fall.
It is inherently unfair and destabilizing if people can sit on alleged wrongs, violations of agreements, etc. indefinitely, either intentionally or because they were ignorant or negligent, and then raise those wrongs in the court system any time they choose to.
A statute of limitations basically says "take your rights and obligations seriously and when you have a dispute over them with another party, raise it in a reasonable amount of time or forever hold your peace".
2. Most people draw a line where it seems needlessly cruel to prosecute an old crime; an extreme example, should a middle-aged person with decades of good behavior live in fear of being prosecuted for a relatively small crime committed as a teenager? Conversely, if a person commits a crime as a teenager, shouldn't they have clemency if they stop committing crimes for a long time and become a good citizen? Most people prefer the outcome that people can put smaller mistakes behind them; they may debate where to draw the lines, of course.
- If you wait too long to pursue a case, then the reliability of evidence goes down, as people lose older records, memories fail, physical infrastructure is replaced, etc.
- Statutes of limitations diminish the ability of malicious accusers to pursue cases against their targets.
- Statutes of limitations also create a sense of finality to a situation; it prevents people from coming out of the woodwork to unsettle something settled 20 years ago.
- In general, the clock runs from when you first find out about an injury to when you can first take action do something about it. That action isn't necessarily to actually file a lawsuit; there are often many things you can do to pause or reset the clock before filing the lawsuit.
- They also incentivize people to pursue redress sooner rather than later, with the concomitant benefits of doing so.
- If it takes you, say, five years to figure out that you are really mad about being injured by somebody... why were you fine with it for five years? It really undercuts your argument about the seriousness of the injury to delay for so long.
That was my first thought as well.
Source: cannabis and Law&Order reruns.
In another case I was paid out and my options supposedly terminated when a company I worked for was acquired by Splunk. The startup had used Carta to manage the options and nobody terminated the agreements in Carta and I kept vesting. The joke was I was going to wait to fully vest and then ask them to convert to Splunk stock. Someone eventually noticed and they revoked all agreements in the system. I still wonder how that would have played out legally, but I also wasn't interested in double dipping.
You're intentionally trying to muddle the waters here by arguing along two different axis.
1. the contract granting options has a delivery period (in your words "expiry period")
2. the options themselves have a duration (aka expiry period)
When you are saying "Unless the options grant had specific language of an expiry period" you are only talking about the delivery period of the options. Aka when the options become available. So you are not complaining about late delivery, you're complaining about lack of delivery.
When you are saying "I would gather there's a very good chance of a large payout." you are intentionally confusing (1.) with (2.). The delivered options have a value on the open market and that value was not delivered. Hence there is a contradiction. You're saying "large payout" but the options are only worth a fraction of the shares at the time the issues vested. You do not get to simulate the most optimal future that you would have exercised the options and held them for thirty years, you have to prove that yourself and the best time to prove that was 27 years ago aka within the statue of limitations. Now that 30 years passed, you have to argue that you would have held the options all the way until today and exercised them today, but the grant only covers the option premium at the time of the grant, not the option premium of a 30 year long option. So Nvidia can still give you your options but the options would give you the exact same duration as the options back then and you would get exactly the same premium on them.
Basically you could make Nvidia the offer to settle for the value of the options so that you stay quiet and don't sue them, that's what your lawyers can get out of that contract.
Edit: Correction with regards to how big the payout can be, can be found here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49874789
You're intentionally making this far more complicated than my original statement along countless axes.
Firms can be sanctioned for pursuing cases knowing the statute of limitations has expired.
> Breach of a written contract: 4 years from the date the contract was broken.
Which part do you think is debatable?
> Sometimes, if the problem (like the injury or damage) was not discovered right away, the statute of limitations generally starts counting from the date the problem was discovered or should reasonably have been discovered, whichever comes first.
Or he sold them years ago for far less than they are worth now, in which case he could have a claim for the original shares which were worth a few k after interest.
What OP has here is a license to go on a fishing expedition through NVIDIA.
Let's say those options were worth $0.25 back then, Nvidia would have to issue an option with a strike price of $224.72 at a share price of $225.07 and the same duration to honor the contract. They could also set the issue date and duration to be the IPO day and the strike price the IPO share price, but then the premium difference would have to compensate the gap between the IPO price and the current price and you'd have to pay that premium difference out of pocket to simulate the fact that you kept holding an option, then let it expire and kept paying the premium to buy new options to extend it.
Edit: I didn't read the letter when I wrote this so my numbers are off. He might be owed $100k+ worth of options if the strike price was $0.05 and the share price was $12. I apologize for wrong numbers, but the general concept should stay valid.