The graffiti artist set to earn $200m from Facebook IPO

A graffiti artist is set to make $200m from the Facebook IPO after he opted for shares instead of a cash payment for his work in the head office seven years ago.

David Choe painted the California HQ in 2005 and was offered the choice of payment in a few thousand dollars or the equivalent in shares.

After opting to take the shares, he is now one of the 1,000 employees set to become a millionaire in the social networking giant's $5bn IPO, according to the Daily Mail.

Sources said Choe believed the social networking site to be "pointless" at the time but he carried out the work anyway and returned to the new HQ recently to carry out further work alongside founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook filed earnings details yesterday ahead of its long-awaited IPO where it looks set to raise $5bn - outstripping the previous $1.4bn record set by Google - valuing the company at up to $100bn.

Zuckerberg is to take a pay cut from $500,000 last year to $1 in 2013 but he will still have 57% of the company's voting rights despite owning only around a quarter of the shares.

However, he is unlikely to be troubled by the pay cut. Forbes magazine estimated his wealth to be $17.5bn in a recent survey of the richest people in the US.