Artist who painted Facebook's first office made fortune after accepting 0.25% stock instead of $60,000
Stocks are often a risk, especially in new companies that have trajectories that are difficult to predict, yet one artist struck gold by taking stock options as payment instead of cash when he painted Facebook's first offices nearly two decades ago.
All companies have to start somewhere, and it's become a bit of a trend for startups to offer employees and advisors stock as incentives or payment as part of the long-term process.
More often than not, that doesn't work out as planned, as companies stumble and collapse over the years, but those who are lucky enough can become millionaires overnight when a business goes public.
That exact process happened to artist David Choe, who was commissioned by Napster founder and then-president of Facebook Sean Parker to paint murals of Silicon Valley in the very first offices of the mega-hit social media platform, as per Market Realist.
What was David Choe paid by Facebook?
Famously, Choe was given the option between a $60,000 up-front payment or 0.25% of Facebook stock upon the completion of his artwork inside the company's headquarters.
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Most people would laugh at the stock option as turning down tens of thousands of dollars for money that you might only get at some point in the future is, by all means, a terrible and incredibly risky decision.
Choe certainly thought the same, too, believing that Facebook and social media as a whole were a 'joke' that had no chance of taking off, yet Parker insisted that he take the stock, and we're betting he's glad he did today.
It's unclear quite how many stock options Choe's 0.25% share equated to at the time he was given them, but upon Facebook's long-awaited public offering in 2012 which valued stocks at $38 per share, the artist managed to earn a jaw-dropping amount of around $200,000,000 - 333,233% more than the initial $60,000 he could have taken.
How much would Choe's stock be worth today?
As mentioned, there's no true way of knowing exactly how many shares Choe held when Facebook went public, and the transition to Meta does make the situation slightly more complex, but at $38 per share with an overall valuation of $104 billion, there were likely around 2,736,842,105 total shares.
That would mean that Choe held roughly 6,842,105 shares - although based on the touted figure of $200 million, it was likely slightly less - and that would mean that he would hold an even greater fortune based on the current Meta stock price.
According to CompaniesMarketCap, Meta Platforms' individual share price at the time of writing is $719.01, which would translate to $4,919,541,916 across Choe's 0.25% stake, making him roughly the 776th richest person in the world, as per Forbes, if he'd kept hold of them.
What did he spend the money on?
Of course, Choe did sell his Facebook holdings as soon as the company went public, and you certainly can't blame him either, as he'd been waiting years for the commission to land!
He didn't seem to think too carefully about the funds either, as one of his most famous uses of the money involved a nationwide scavenger hunt with a $100,000 grand prize that he kept in a shoebox in his room.
He also created an elaborate and exclusive art exhibition in Los Angeles which, while free to enter, required participants to go through a lengthy application process and sign a non-disclosure agreement so that the contents of the show would not be known to the public.