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Meet Evan Spiegel, the Guy Behind Snapchat: What Is He Doing With Snap?
For someone that runs a social media empire, he sure is private!
The name of Even Spiegel is known around the world, but beyond co-founding Snapchat and being engaged to Miranda Kerr, what else do we really know about the guy? He’s secretive about his life—there are zero posts on his Instagram and Twitter accounts—but the interest on him has grown since he decided to file an initial public offering for his company.
Spiegel had a lavish and enviable childhood. As the son of two successful and Ivy League-educated lawyers, he was able to experience the best of what money could buy, including luxury cars a private education. When he was 16, he was given a Cadillac Escalade, which he eventually traded in for a BMW 550i because it was more fuel efficient.
His early years of education were spent inside Crossroads in Santa Monica, a school that was also attended by Kate Hudson, Jonah Hill and Gwyneth Paltrow. He then went on to study product design at Stanford, but—like the other billionaires of our time—he dropped out a few credits short of graduation and spent his time developing Snapchat.
By 2012, co-founders Spiegel, Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy had already developed the bulk of Snapchat. Brown, however, sued Spiegel and Murphy the following year for forcing him out of the company without equity. The case was settled for US$157.5 million.
Spiegel is also known for having turned down Mark Zuckerberg’s US$3 billion offer in 2013. At the time, he said it was because selling would be an uninteresting short term gain. But in a speech he delivered at the USC Marshall Undergraduate Commencement in 2015, he was a little more eloquent.
“The fastest way to figure out if you are doing something truly important to you is to have someone offer you a bunch of money to part with it.”
In the summer of 2015, Spiegel started to date Victoria Secret model Miranda Kerr, giving further evidence to the fact that the girl knows how to choose her men. In July 2016, the two announced their engagement. That same year, Snapchat officially became Snap, Inc., which released the camera-equipped Spectacles.
For two years, Spiegel has been named the youngest self-made billionaire by Forbes, but his net worth is estimated to jump with Snap’s recent IPO. It is estimated that the company will be valued somewhere between US$20 billion and US$25 billion and it is looking to raise around US$3 billion in the offering. If this happens, Spiegel’s net worth will land somewhere along the horizon of US$5 billion.
