You Are A Facebook User, Right?

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February 5th, 2012

So where were you on Day 1?

To my everlasting disappointment I regret a missed opportunity. I was junior clerk in an engineering office downtown. Next door was a small insurance company. One of the clerks working there was a neighbor of mine in the street where I lived out in the suburbs. He was a few years older than I and we were only on nodding terms, both at home on the street and in the office corridors. From experience gained while working at the insurance company he started up his own insurance company. He collected money from friends by way of $1,000 “investment lots” and gave them shares in exchange. For some reason he never offered me any shares. His new company took off and became, and still is, a major international insurance company and his friends who invested became rich.

The Facebook story

Now it’s Facebook time. At the very start of the Facebook story, a guy called David Choe was asked to paint murals on the walls of the offices. Choe, who says his “dirty-style figure paintings combine themes of desire, degradation, and exaltation”, took shares in Facebook instead of a cash payment. He chose to gamble his fee and now the shares look like being the hottest property on the US stock market.

Street artist

Choe calls his painting style “dirty.” In his documentary, he says his smeared and smudged painting method comes from being left-handed when he was little. He told an art magazine, “dirty styles is painting on found object besides a blank piece of paper or blank white wall … so even before you start there’s some history, there’s some spills, chills and marks, then you keep creating more history on top of that, spilling, spraying, dripping, creaming, collaging, making a mess. I create hope from dark beginnings.”

The Facebook IPO

With Facebook being pitched in the $75-$100 billion range, those murals could turn out to be more expensive than the $140 million paid in 2006 for Pollock’s No 5, 1948, or even the $200.7 million paid at auction for a collection of Damien Hirst pieces in 2008. Jackson Pollock may lose his record for creating the most expensive painting ever, not to another enfant terrible of the art world, but to a minor Los Angeles mural painter who happened upon the Facebook offices in 2005.

New-found wealth

Although Choe declined to speak about his new-found wealth, his Facebook fanpage tells his story: “In 2005, internet entrepreneur Sean Parker, a longtime fan, asked him to paint graphic sexual murals in the interior of Facebook’s first Silicon Valley office, and in 2007, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg commissioned him to paint somewhat tamer murals for their next office.”

Millionaires and billionaires

David Choe could be the unlikeliest of all the millionaires and billionaires who will be minted by the social network’s flotation this year. If the company hits the top valuations being talked about, then Choe will have been paid about $200 million for the “graphic sexual murals” that adorned Facebook’s walls in its early years. Is he a good artist? Who cares?

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 5th, 2012 at 4:15 am and is filed under Business, Economy, Employment, Finance, Money, Personal / Internet, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

You Are A Facebook User, Right?

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