David Choe is a homeless artist who chose stock options instead of $60,000 from Facebook and now has a payout of about $200 million coming his way. The sum makes Choe’s work the second most expensive piece of artwork in history, right after a Cezanne. The problem with this thrilling rags-to-riches story is that it isn’t exactly truthful.
David Choe is a multimedia artist. He’s traveled the world and some of his pieces hang on the walls in private collections. On his website, and depending on the scope of the proposed project, commissions are priced between $1,000 and $50,000. Prints in his store range from $100 to $400, and Choe-designed T-shirts are sold at Barney’s. And while David Choe may not have one single place he calls home, his life is not what you picture when you hear the term homeless.
Rather than living in one place, Choe has opted for a rootless lifestyle, living in casinos and hotels, by his own account preferring Vietnam, Israel, New York City, and the Bay area. While he wasn’t astronomically wealthy before, he was financially secure. Choe says that the new-found, Facebook-funded wealth has mostly served to deplete his privacy. In an interview with Barbra Walters, he says:
“It’s gonna sound horrible for me to say money is meaningless,” he said. “But everyone’s like: What are you gonna do now, now that you have all this money and freedom? I did everything I wanted to when I had nothing. Everyone’s like: Well, what are you gonna do now? I’m like, I’m still gonna do whatever I want except more people are just gonna bother me now.”
My words of advice for Choe? Start a foundation or find a charity you like. Hundreds of millions of dollars is a huge gift, and if you’re lucky enough not to need, you must have met people in your travels who do.
It’s not a ‘piece’, as the original article you linked points out.
I like the idea of him setting up a charitable foundation. If he gets the right person to run it, he can simply direct all queries there and tell people that he deliberately has no control over who gets a grant.
he was on the Howard Stern show a while ago. He gave a great interview (also felt that the social network was not historically accurate)
If you’re really burdened by all that wealth, I could really use 0.01% of it.I’m sure you could find another 10,000 people just like me.