If then-President of Facebook Sean Parker had come to you in 2005, asked you to paint his new offices with a bunch of cocks, and then offered to pay you in either a few thousand dollars in cold hard cash or just the equivalent in company stock, you would probably have gone for the cash, right? Particularly if the company seemed on the whole sort of "pointless" to you, as it did to so many of us around then even though we were already becoming addicted to it? Fortunately for the painter, wild child graffiti artist David Choe, he picked the stock, which the New York Times points out is now about to be worth $200 million:
In 2005, Mr. Choe was invited to paint murals on the walls of Facebook's first offices in Palo Alto, Calif., by Sean Parker, then Facebook's president. As pay, Mr. Parker offered Mr. Choe a choice between cash in the "thousands of dollars," according to several people who know Mr. Choe, or stock then worth about the same.
Mr. Choe, who has said that at the time that he thought the idea of Facebook was "ridiculous and pointless," nevertheless chose the stock.
Many "advisers" to the company at that time, which is how Mr. Choe would have been classified, would have received about 0.1 to 0.25 percent of the company, according to a former Facebook employee. That may sound like a paltry amount, but a stake that size is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, based on a market value of $100 billion. Mr. Choe's payment is valued at roughly $200 million, according to a number of people who know Mr. Choe and Facebook executives.
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