The way I heard the story, and I was at FedEx in Memphis
at the time, Fred went to Vegas to see Howard Hughes and
pitch for an investment and won the $27 K while waiting
to see Hughes.

That week the company asked employees to delay cashing their
paychecks if they could.

At the time, I was doing operations research working on fleet scheduling, etc. Likely there was a lot of money to be saved with better scheduling of the fleet.

I'd written
the first software for scheduling the fleet, and one evening Roger Frock (mentioned in the article) and I used my software to do a schedule for all planned 33 airplanes and all planned 90 cities. Our two representatives from Board Member General Dynamics checked the 'feasibility' of the schedule and announced "It's a little tight in a few places but it's flyable". Some members of the board had been concerned or even convinced that a schedule would not be possible. So, the schedule Roger and I did alleviated the concerns and, as I was told, enabled $55 million in funding, i.e., loans, on the airplanes.

At a senior staff meeting, Fred's remark on the schedule was
"An amazing document. Solved the most important problem
facing the start of Federal Express.". Yup, it had been
six weeks in my living room in Maryland connected to a time sharing computer for 80 hours a week writing PL/I code while finishing teaching two computer science courses at Georgetown U.

That FedEx was close to going under didn't bother me much, but the stock I'd been promised "within two weeks" with my offer to join still was not there 18 months later and bothered me a lot.

If I couldn't get the promised stock when the company was close to folding, then staying around and helping to save the company would get me what? With no stock, I was going to graduate school to have a better career in operations research.

Then Fred called me to his office and said: "You know, if you stay, then you are in line for $500,000 in Federal Express stock." But he wasn't giving me that statement on paper with a signature. My manager, Mike Basch, SVP Planning, was there with me with Fred. My office was next to Fred's with Mike's across the hall. No, given that the promised stock was already 18 months late, the company was close to going under, and Fred was not putting his statement in writing, I didn't know I was in line for any stock at all.

Apparently none of Fred's talk about stock meant anything: With the original copy of the offer letter, all the promises, all my records from then, when I contacted Fred with all the information, he and his FedEx lawyer refused to pay me anything, and a lawyer told me that legally FedEx owed me nothing.

The work I was doing would likely have saved FedEx a LOT of money soon. E.g., a good first shot would have been to modify the scheduling software to include some accurate costing and then just use it to develop schedules with the least cost by just intuitive methods. For a second cut, generate and cost out many possible individual airplane trips from Memphis to the cities and back. Then use that data for integer linear programming (ILP) set covering with one column for each possible trip and one row for each city to be served, say, a few dozen cities growing to the planned 90. Then use some column generation (Gilmore and Gomory) and some branch and bound. Easily should have saved millions a year in fuel and other operational costs quickly. I had world expert in integer linear programming George Nemhauser lined up as a consultant, and I was writing
software in PL/I on an IBM CP67/CMS system.

Actually, well into the start of FedEx, Fred
had planned to do the first schedules himself. When he tried, for just a few cities, just by hand, from his office, when FedEx was still in Little Rock, at the
end of the afternoon he came out of his office saying
"We need a computer". A guy I had known in college heard that and gave me a call.

Yes, ILP set covering is in NP-complete. So, no one has
a guaranteed polynomial algorithm for worst case
examples. But that doesn't mean that can't save a lot
of money fairly easily in cases of interest. Sure, might
have trouble guaranteeing to save the last 10 cents, but if
save $5 million a month over the best solution otherwise,
then just saved, let me see here, right, $5 million a
month.

I didn't get the stock, and Fred didn't get the savings.

Fred has been very successful, but he didn't do it alone, and some promises about stock were not kept.

One lesson is, from what my wife told me as I joined FedEx, "Get it in writing". Well, my offer letter said I'd be in the stock plan, but apparently that was meaningless legally. Better still, get a lawyer. Better still, start and own your own company. Back to it.