Net Worth Over Time: $1.5 B
Evan Spiegel is the CEO of Snapchat,
the temporary photo messaging company he cofounded with Bobby Murphy in 2011.
After growing up comfortably in the Los Angeles area, he was educated at the Crossroads School for Arts and
Sciences in Santa Monica, and attended Stanford University. Spiegel took
design classes at the Otis College of Art and Design while still
in high school and at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena the summer before entering Stanford.
He once had an unpaid internship
in sales at Red Bull. While a student, he worked as a paid
intern for a biomedical company, as a careers instructor in Cape Town,
South Africa, and at Intuit
on the TxtWeb project.
He met Murphy, who was two years ahead
of him and studying math, at the Kappa Sigma frat house. The two eventually
developed an app that could send photo messages to contacts with a timer that
would remove them in 10 seconds or less and called it Picaboo. It flopped.
Rebranded as Snapchat, the app took off in the fall of 2011 and is now used by
100 million people monthly, for free. In late 2013 Spiegel turned down a $3
billion buyout offer from Facebook. In February 2015 the company reportedly
received offers that would value it at $19 billion. Forbes estimates that
Speigel and Murphy each have ownership stakes of at least 15%. In September
2014 the duo got rid of a significant distraction, settling out of court with
another former fraternity brother and early creator of the app, Reggie Brown.
Spiegel sees a big future for his company. "There are very few people in
the world who get to build a business like this," he told Forbes in late
2013. "I think trading that for some short-term gain isn't very
interesting."
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