Facebook stock: 6 intriguing investors

Facebook stock will make many people suddenly wealthy when it begins trading this Friday. The company is expected to be valued somewhere around $100 billion, with stock expected to sell anywhere between $34 and $38 per share.  Here are six of the more unexpected people set to make a killing with initial public offering of Facebook stock, including a rock star, a graffiti artist, and pair of Mark Zuckerberg’s enemies.

2. David Choe (graffiti artist)

Jeff Chiu/AP
This May 11, 2012, photo shows workers at the Facebook office in Menlo Park, Calif. Well-known graffiti artist David Choe is set make about $200 million off the Facebook IPO, after being paid in Facebook stock for his graffiti work at the company's first headquarters in 2005.

In 2005, graffiti artist David Choe was commissioned to spray paint the first Facebook, Inc. headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. Instead of taking a $60,000 cash payment, he opted for stock shares – a bet that stands to earn him between $200 million and $500 million once the IPO debuts. It was a risky decision at the time; Facebook was still a fledgling company, and this was back in the days when the social network was still limited to college students. But it paid off in a huge way.

Publicly, at least, Choe seems unfazed by his immense and newly minted wealth. "It's gonna sound horrible for me to say money is meaningless," he told Barbara Walters back in February, when the Facebook IPO was first announced. "But everyone's like: 'What are you gonna do now, now that you have all this money and freedom?' I'm like, 'I'm still gonna do whatever I want, except more people are just gonna bother me now.' "

2 of 6

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.