Comment by jrowen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrowen | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Thanks for sharing your story in straightforward detail. Do you believe, in an ethical sense (independent of the legal sense), that you are owed roughly a billion dollars?

It sounds like you were rather negligent as well. You didn't care to have any inkling of memory of the vesting schedule in 1996, or just to double check and "wrap up" the financial details of that agreement after the work was done?

It does seem somewhat suspect to elide mention of what became of the shares that you did own, and that you only re-noticed Nvidia in 2024. Every 14 year old PC nerd/gamer knew that name in 2001. It is quite a feat of negligence to wait that long to dig this up.

You seem like a decent person, and I do believe that you are justly owed something, but I must admit that I find this to be a depressing tale of rich people spinning wheels for naught. A modest inflation-adjusted multiple of the original value of the options seems reasonable.

Before anyone accuses me of shilling or white-knighting for a major corporation, I don't have any broader sympathy for them and I would generally take the side of David over Goliath, which I think some commenters are making this out to be, but it seems more like Mini-Goliath and Mega-Goliath are bikeshedding and David has no stake in the matter.

"You didn't care to have any inkling of memory of the vesting schedule in 1996, or just to double check and "wrap up" the financial details of that agreement after the work was done?"

Give the guy a break. It was a check of 700 bucks for exercising shares in a small (at the time) company that was not even public. Most people would probably not notice the error in the 1 year vs 4 year exercise schedule. Especially because 4 years is the standard, so that seems rather normal to agree to that even though it was an error and differing from the original offer.

Ethically? Difficult question. I may not be a decent person as you posit, but I do like to think of myself as reasonable. I certainly never expected NVIDIA to say "aw shucks" and write me a billion dollar check. At the last lawyer meeting we proposed to settle for a far smaller number, which both sides agreed was reasonable. A number not picked out of a hat, but based on rather complex nuances such as the likelihood I would have sold etc.etc. derived from much legal thought. And they still made the call to say nope. I think it is perfectly clear from the options contract what the vesting term was. And certainly I erred in not realizing this earlier, before the statute of limitations tolled. Though in 1996 the stock was priced at 5 cents, so not something I paid enough attention to, not having the foresight or perhaps the necessary faith in Jensen's perseverance, intelligence, and luck. Hindsight is cheap.

If I were you I would refrain from offering thoughts like this publicly. You don't want to hav any of this used against you.

It is clear he has decided to not pursue this any further.

That doesn’t mean we should encourage him.

A good framework would have been this: for the options you received, let's see what you did. Did you trade them 3 years later, resulting in $X amount? Then, let's assume you would have done the same with the missing stock options. I would guess that the amount would be really negligible - in the tens or hundreds of thousands, at most. Ethically, I think this is where I would consider it fair to both parties.

Then, you neglected this for ~30 years. It's fair to say that Nvidia doesn't owe you anything at this point.

Wouldn't be surprised if you weren't the only person with equity in nvidia around that time with similar paperwork errors, were that to be the case if word got around they settled with you, more people would start coming forward for the easy money.

> 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.

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?

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 ...

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

> Most Indians were hunter/gatherers, and suggesting that because someone roves through massive tracts of land is ownership, is beyond weird.

It is not "beyond weird." It is a well-defended position in contemporary political theory and it has had many prominent defenders for hundreds of years. For example, in the 1790s, Immanuel Kant wrote:

It can still be asked whether, when neither nature nor chance but just our own will brings us into the neighborhood of a people that holds out no prospect of a civil union with it, we should not be authorized to found colonies, by force if need be, in order to establish a civil union with them and bring these human beings (savages) into a rightful condition (as with the American Indians, the Hottentots and the inhabitants of New Holland); or (which is not much better), to found colonies by fraudulent purchase of their land, and so become owners of their land, making use of our superiority without regard for their first possession. Should we not be authorized to do this, especially since nature itself (which abhors a vacuum) seems to demand it, and great expanses of land in other parts of the world, which are now splendidly populated, would have otherwise remained uninhabited by civilized people or, indeed, would have to remain forever uninhabited, so that the end of creation would have been frustrated? But it is easy to see through this veil of injustice (Jesuitism), which would sanction any means to good ends. Such a way of acquiring land is therefore to be repudiated.

I see no relevance in your quoted text, with respect to what I said in my post. And the premise I cited is indeed beyond weird.

Note that I said seasonal camping sites make sense. And I said treaties make sense. I simply said 'wandering about' doesn't convey ownership, aka 'possession'. To take such a notion to the extreme, imagine a grouping of 4 who rove all around the entirety of Canada and the US through their lifetime. You could easily do this over 20 to 30 years. Should those 4 be attributed possession? As owners of that entire landmass via treaty, or just prevent any use of that land by anyone else?

Absurd. And it is equally absurd that land used for travel between two campsites, basically as a road, should mysteriously convey ownership/possession too.

For example, typically there were winter and summer camp sites in the US. Yet when not doing so, Natives would often 'rove' from one of the other, think 'migration'. Yet I've seen ridiculous assertions that someone basically using the land as a road between two campsites, to conveys ownership. Sheer nonsense.

Your argument in the post up-thread appears to be that because the Native Americans did not cultivate or make use of the land in any Western sense, they have no claim to ownership. The Kant quote attempts to repudiate this by stating that it makes no difference whether we consider the Native Americans' use of the land to be ineffective: their deprivation of it is still an injustice and, when it comes to injustice, the ends cannot justify the means.

I don't find Kant's position at all convincing, mostly because the two parties' understandings of the concept of "ownership" were not mutually intelligible (possession vs usufruction). However, the quote does have relevance to your post.

The key here is 'use'. Kant, while obviously not some gospel to be held to any form of authority, is making a point about differences in culture and sure, as you said, use. However, my point wasn't disputing usage at all. Living on it. Hunting on it. Working the land.

However no view exists in a vacuum, and I will indelibly view my example of a group of 4 as a valid statement, about the absurdities of 'walked on the land once in my life, to get to my summer/winter home', compared to some claims of a tribe of a few hundred people, somehow owning hundreds of millions of acres of land, just cause they walked on tiny parts of it to get to their seasonal homes.

So no, I don't see the relevance, because I'm not discussing the concepts therein directly.

Under contract law, should the treaties be honored if the other party weren’t capable of full understanding of what they were signing? I agree with you, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

This is a complex and nuanced point, but there is complexity and such nuance elsewhere, too. For example, I often see "trillions of dollars of $city land are in dispute!" then citing that a settlement of immense magnitude should result.

Of course, the land in question was effectively open forest/plains, isolated with no cities and almost no one living on or around it. And if it remained as so, by todays standards, would be worth often dollars per acre. Meanwhile, we're attributing dollar amounts to land which only became valuable, because it was developed by some means.

While I am not directly answering your question, I frankly find the 'cut off' period to be quite weird. Everyone on the planet has ancestors which have been displaced, AND have displaced peoples. We're both the conquerors and the conquered. For example, I have Scottish heritage. Where's the payment for the land the English stole from my ancestors? And for the English, where's the payment that the Romans owe, for the land taken from those in the isles 2k years ago? Or the French owe, when they invaded and hung out for a while?

Individuals were displaced, entire groupings of people slaughter or literally decimated.

It goes on and on and on, back through time, all owing all. Yet that is completely ignored, including endless land grabs all over the planet even over the last 2 centuries, but... oh well, significant compensation and land returns are only really given to those in North America.

I believe in fairness. And to me, this seems... off somehow.

It's because the moral standing for these measures is primitive tribalism, and neither principled nor disinterested.

Well I think you just proved my point on why land ownership is not a simple analogy :)

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com