San Francisco (dpa) – Facebook's IPO is expected to mint 1,000 new millionaires among the company's 3,000 employees, and many have already started splashing the cash. The Peninsula Press, which covers Facebook's hometown of Palo Alto, reported seeing two brand new Porsches, price stickers still attached, leaving the company's offices on Wednesday. “For so many of them, owning a Porsche was a dream from when they were little,” the local Porsche dealer said of the new Silicon Valley millionaires, sometimes called “millionerds” because of their techy roots. “We just hope we have enough inventory.” Home sellers, jewellery stores, restaurants and wine shops are all expecting the influx of cash to bring a surge of customers, boosting a local economy already basking in the riches created by Apple, Google and Zynga. “You get a Yahoo guy against a Facebook guy against a Zynga guy against an Apple guy against a Google guy, then it's not just about the house,” real estate agent Carol Rodoni told the paper. “It's about the egos.” The Facebook effect will be so strong that California's top economist listed it as a key way for the state to close its 9-billion-dollar budget gap from taxes on the new fortunes. The biggest beneficiary of the IPO will be Mark Zuckerberg, the 27-year-old founder, whose stake in the company will be worth 28 billion dollars. He is remarkably unostentatious, living in an average family home, driving a modest sedan and still wearing his trademark hooded sweatshirt. A bit more flashy is U2 frontman Bono, whose venture capital firm took a 1-per-cent stake in Facebook in 2009 for 90 million dollars. That stake should be worth more than 1 billion dollars by the time of the IPO. Paypal founder Peter Thiel will make even more, having invested 500,000 dollars in 2005 for a stake that will be worth 2.5 billion dollars at IPO. Venture capital firm Accell Partners will own an 11.4-billion-dollar stake, while Russian internet group DST will hold a 5.5-billion-dollar stake. Facebook co-counder Dustin Moskowitz, Zuckerberg's former roommate, will own a 7.6-billion-dollar piece of the social networking company, while the Winklevoss twins, who unsuccessfully sued Zuckerberg for stealing their ideas, will own a 300-million-dollar cut. But in a region that has seen former Google massage practitioners and chefs turned into overnight millionaires, one of the newly rich Facebook beneficiaries still caused a surprise. Grafitti artist David Choe, 35, is set to cash in to the tune of some 200 million dollars – the estimated value of the Facebook shares that he took in payment for some murals he created at Facebook's first headquarters in 2005. According to The New York Times, Choe chose to take stock options in the fledgling company instead of his usual fee of a few thousand dollars. Choe took the shares, even though he thought at the time that the idea of Facebook was “ridiculous and pointless.” BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/AqRiJ Tags: Facebook, IPO, Millionerds Section: Business, Tech
