GoKawiilEarly NVIDIA advisor says he is owed roughly $1 billion in unpaid stock options
A former technical advisor to NVIDIA, who worked with the company in 1993 on biquadratic texture mapping for its first graphics chip, says he recently discovered he was granted 25,000 stock options that appear never to have been exercised or paid out. He describes helping port his rendering technique to NVIDIA's early hardware and demonstrating it publicly before Microsoft's DirectX standard favored triangle-only rendering, which he says hurt NVIDIA's early business.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
If accurate, the claim highlights how equity grants to early startup collaborators can go untracked for decades, only surfacing once a company's stock becomes extraordinarily valuable. It also raises questions about how NVIDIA, now one of the world's most valuable companies, handled historical option grants to outside advisors, though the piece does not indicate NVIDIA has responded to or confirmed the claim.
- A self-described early NVIDIA technical advisor says he holds unexercised options from 1993 now potentially worth about $1 billion.
- The options relate to work on biquadratic texture mapping used in NVIDIA's first chip, the NV1.
- Microsoft's DirectX excluding quadratic texture support reportedly hurt NVIDIA's early financial prospects.
Source: colo.to — Eric Gullichsen, 2026-09-28
Published there as: “Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock”
Read the original report → The summary and analysis above are GoKawiil's own, written from reporting by the source above. Facts and quotes belong to the original publisher.