The $60,000 Mural That Became $200 Million
Published October 6, 2026
In 2005, graffiti artist David Choe painted murals inside Facebook's first Palo Alto headquarters and chose company stock over about $60,000 in cash. When Facebook went public in 2012, the New York Times estimated his shares were worth upward of $200 million — a mural commission that out-earned Sotheby's record sale of a Damien Hirst work.
In February 2012, when Facebook filed to go public, the business press ran the usual arithmetic on who would get rich — and one name on the list startled everyone. It was not an engineer or a venture capitalist. It was a graffiti artist. The New York Times reported that David Choe, who had painted the walls of the social network's first headquarters, held shares 'expected to be worth upward of $200 million when Facebook stock trades publicly later this year.'
The story began seven years earlier in Palo Alto. In 2005, Sean Parker, Facebook's first president, hired Choe to cover the walls of the company's first office with his signature murals. Choe was offered a choice for the job: about $60,000 in cash, or the same amount in Facebook stock. He took the stock.
It was a strange bet to make. Facebook in 2005 was a fast-growing college network, not a sure thing — a startup whose survival was anything but guaranteed. Choe was an artist, not an investor, and the shares were an illiquid wager on a company that had yet to prove it could make real money. He accepted them anyway and went back to painting.
When the stock began trading, the wager had compounded beyond anything a mural commission could have paid. Facebook's 2012 public offering turned the company's early equity into one of the most famous wealth-creation events in technology history, minting millionaires — and in the executive suite, billionaires — across the cap table. Metro US noted at the time that Choe's payout for the murals could exceed even Sotheby's record $200.7 million sale of a Damien Hirst work in 2008: a mural commission out-earning a canonical auction record.
The episode became the canonical example of startup-equity upside: the contractor who chose ownership over a fee and ended up wealthier than almost every employee in the building. Choe kept making art in the same uncompromising style, and the windfall became part of his legend — the outsider who got paid in the future and let the future arrive.
The lesson is not that everyone should gamble their paycheck on a startup — most such bets go to zero, and Choe could easily have taken the cash and never thought twice. It is that equity is a fundamentally different instrument from a fee: capped upside versus uncapped upside. When you are offered a slice instead of a check, the question is not just what it is worth today, but what it could become if the whole enterprise compounds. Choe's murals were worth $60,000 the day he painted them. Seven years later, they were worth $200 million — because he had been paid, without quite planning it, in the company's future.
The lesson: Equity is a different instrument from a fee — capped upside versus uncapped — and when you're offered a slice instead of a check, the real question is what it could become if the whole enterprise compounds.
Source: original reporting · How we source stories