In 2005, Facebook was barely an idea — a «ridiculous and pointless» one, according to David Choe, the graffiti artist who was asked to paint the fledgling social network’s headquarters in Silicon Valley.

Yet that same idea, which looked at the time like a reckless bet, turned out by 2012 to be an extraordinarily smart one. It made Choe a multimillionaire within a few years.

The artist who painted Facebook’s headquarters

In 2005, Choe’s work caught the eye of Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster. Parker had just become president of the newborn start-up Facebook, and he hired Choe to cover the company’s first offices in Palo Alto — the economic heart of Silicon Valley — with murals.

Although Choe looked down on those early attempts at social media and considered Facebook «a joke», he took the job anyway, agreeing to a fee of $60,000.

Parker gave him a choice between cash and company stock, which at the time were worth roughly the same. Taking the shares was the riskier option, with no guarantee the company would ever succeed — the stock could have ended up worth nothing.

Choe took the leap anyway and chose the shares.

The 2012 IPO

At Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2012, Choe’s stake was estimated at between 0.1% and 0.2%. That may sound trivial, but a slice of that size translated into hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stock.

When Facebook went public at $38 a share, his stock options were worth $200 million — making David Choe a bona fide multimillionaire.

The artist went on to use his unexpected windfall in some unusual ways. In 2014, for instance, Choe found $100,000 in a shoebox in his room and decided to give it all away through an elaborate, nationwide treasure hunt, in which participants had to follow clues shared across his various social media accounts.

Choe and his work have also drawn controversy. In 2017, a mural he had just finished in New York’s Bowery neighborhood was almost immediately defaced with graffiti in protest against his alleged history of sexual assault. Choe addressed the backlash, acknowledging and apologizing for a complicated past, but publicly denied any wrongdoing.

Editor’s note

This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Giulia Sami on August 06, 2026 as «Così Facebook ha reso multimilionario un artista di graffiti». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.