Thread: Artist Makes Millions thx to Facebook

Artist Becomes Millionaire Thanks to Facebook

Mural/Graffiti Artist David Choe painted some murals in the Facebook offices and chose to take shares (stock) as payment instead of cash. When Facebook floats he'll be worth an estimated $200 Million.

David Choe, an American muralist of Korean descent, painted in 2005 some art works to decorate Facebook offices and took his earnings in shares of the company instead of money. Now he owns a fortune.

In 2005, Sean Parker, Napster's founder and Facebook's founding president, asked David Choe to paint murals in the interior of Facebook's first Silicon Valley office. At that time, Facebook was far from being such a popular social network as it is today.

Instead of getting paid in money, David decided to take an equal value of shares of Facebook's stock.

According to The New York Times, the shares owned by the artist are expected to be worth more than $200 million when Facebook stock trades publicly later this year.

David's Blog shows pics and movies of the murals he did. Fun and money goes well together.

Reminds me of the chef who worked at google.

The 6 Least Impressive Ways Anyone Ever Got Rich | Cracked.com

"the new company even offers you a bunch of stock options you can cash in should they ever hit it big. It all seems pretty cute, so you accept their offer. Startups are always happy to throw around stock options as an incentive (it's risk-free, because the options are worth nothing, and will continue to be worth nothing unless the company takes off). So, you run the company's cafeteria for several years, no big deal.
Less than 10 years later, you cash in your stock options and leave a cool $26 million richer.
Because the company in question was a little operation called "Google."

As much as it sounds good, getting rich that easy, I don't think I would like it because I wouldn't feel the satisfaction of knowing I had made my own way and put effort into it. And I wouldn't learn even a tiniest part of what I would have learned.

Originally Posted by Jacob Scholes

As much as it sounds good, getting rich that easy, I don't think I would like it because I wouldn't feel the satisfaction of knowing I had made my own way and put effort into it. And I wouldn't learn even a tiniest part of what I would have learned.

Are you sure? Let's test it.

If you won 10 million dollars in the lottery tomorrow would you give it back just because you didn't learn anything in the process? What if you inherited a few million dollars because someone close to you died and wanted to leave you something for being nice to them? Would you give that to someone else because you didn't learn anything by inheriting the money? I don't think you really would. Not that I'm promoting buying lottery tickets (lotteries are for people who are bad at maths) or hunting inheritance.

It doesn't matter how you get your money (as long as it's legal and ethical I suppose) as long as it comes fast and you don't spend your entire life fighting for it and die broke. It matters what you do after you have it (so you can keep it). Find something satisfying to do after you're free. The aim is not to learn how to be free. The aim is to actually BE free to live a life that is not filled with chasing money down. Most people live their lives chasing more money in order to be free. Filling your life with that activity is what gets (most of) us down.

Besides, I'm not sure how he did it was a bad thing. He's an artist and he painted - he did something he loved. He could have got paid in shoes if that's what made him happy but instead he chose to take stock (shares). That seems fair enough to me - most artists get paid nothing. He might have spent only a few days doing the murals so it might not have been much skin off his nose.

That puts even more emphasis on a part from the book "How to Get Rich" from Felix Dennis

it says to try not to give equity...

this is a huge chunk of equity, for something like art to top it off (not like the art actually helped build the company)

Originally Posted by V8Bill

Are you sure? Let's test it.

If you won 10 million dollars in the lottery tomorrow would you give it back just because you didn't learn anything in the process? What if you inherited a few million dollars because someone close to you died and wanted to leave you something for being nice to them? Would you give that to someone else because you didn't learn anything by inheriting the money? I don't think you really would. Not that I'm promoting buying lottery tickets (lotteries are for people who are bad at maths) or hunting inheritance.

It doesn't matter how you get your money (as long as it's legal and ethical I suppose) as long as it comes fast and you don't spend your entire life fighting for it and die broke. It matters what you do after you have it (so you can keep it). Find something satisfying to do after you're free. The aim is not to learn how to be free. The aim is to actually BE free to live a life that is not filled with chasing money down. Most people live their lives chasing more money in order to be free. Filling your life with that activity is what gets (most of) us down.

Besides, I'm not sure how he did it was a bad thing. He's an artist and he painted - he did something he loved. He could have got paid in shoes if that's what made him happy but instead he chose to take stock (shares). That seems fair enough to me - most artists get paid nothing. He might have spent only a few days doing the murals so it might not have been much skin off his nose.

Maybe I didn't make myself clear. Personally, I think building a business is fun. Yes I would probably take the 10 million, but I probably would still start a business too.
And I never said what he did was a bad thing.

Cool, that makes more sense.

The journey can be fun (for sure) but it can also be a pain in the arse. Let's just get the money and then we'll have the rest of our lives to have fun building businesses (if that's our thing).

Originally Posted by BeachBoy

That puts even more emphasis on a part from the book "How to Get Rich" from Felix Dennis

it says to try not to give equity...

this is a huge chunk of equity, for something like art to top it off (not like the art actually helped build the company)

Yes. I agree. It's one thing to give up equity in return for capital to help grow your business; it's a completely different thing to give up equity for unnecessary things like artwork. This is one of the reasons why younger entrepreneurs tend to lose control of their businesses; they give away equity too freely, thinking that it's just worthless pieces of paper but if their company becomes valuable then all of those shares will be worth a lot, and if they give up too many shares, they lose control.