David Choe likes a gamble. That sentence right there might just have been the biggest understatement we’ve ever made.
As a fairly unknown not overly successful artist the then 27 year old was commissioned to paint the office walls of a small social media startup company called Facebook.
He was offered $60,000 dollars in cash, or the equivalent in stocks in the company. Mr. Choe said he “likes to gamble" and noted that he believed in Sean Parker, then Facebook’s president, who had hired Choe to do the painting, despite thinking that the concept of Facebook was "ridiculous and pointless", so he decided to take the stocks.
When Facebook was first floated on the stock market in mid-2012 his shares were worth more than $200 million!
But the epicness of the story, coupled with the fact that Choe’s murals and paintings are seriously cool (if not sometimes controversial) has provided him with just as much money since then, with future projects that have included solo exhibitions in New York, and London.
He provided the cover art for Jay-Z and Linkin Park's multi-platinum album Collision Course, created artwork to decorate the sets of Juno and The Glass House, designed murals for Heidi Fleiss, and during the 2008 presidential race, he painted a portrait of then-Senator Barack Obama for use in a grassroots street art campaign. The original was later displayed in the White House.
Add to this that he has also released 4 books, and now has a successful podcast show it is fairly safe to safe that the Facebook gamble he took has well and truly paid off.
For his website please head on over to here.