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Life is good for Evan Spiegel.
He was given a $800 million bonus for taking his company, Snap Inc., public earlier this year at a $33 billion valuation. Snap's shares have since taken quite the hit, but Spiegel's net worth is still around $4 billion, making the 26-year-old one of the youngest billionaires in the world.
He lives a charmed life, and he knows it.
"I am a young, white, educated male," the Snapchat creator once said at a Stanford business conference. "I got really, really lucky. And life isn't fair."
We've pulled the highlights of Spiegel's spectacular life and career from profiles by LA Weekly, Forbes, Business Insider, court documents, and more.
Spiegel grew up in the Pacific Palisades, a ritzy Los Angeles enclave just east of Malibu. He is the older son of two Ivy League-educated lawyers. His parents divorced when he was in high school.
When Spiegel turned 16 and got his driver's license, he was given a Cadillac Escalade, which he parked in the gated Southern California Edison parking lot next to his school. Spiegel's father represented Edison during the energy crisis.
Source: LA Weekly
Spiegel spent his early years at an ultra-exclusive school called Crossroads in Santa Monica, which costs tens of thousands per academic year. Other notable alumni include Tinder cofounder Sean Rad, Kate Hudson, Jonah Hill, Jack Black, and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Around the time that he landed a marketing internship with Red Bull, Spiegel decided that he wanted a more fuel-efficient car to drive around the city in. In a letter from 2008, Spiegel asked his parents to lease him a BMW 550i, which retails for about $75,000. "Cars bring me sheer joy," he wrote. "I would really appreciate you validating me and all of my hard work by leasing the BMW."
The Spiegels were members of a number of exclusive clubs, including the Jonathan Club in Santa Monica and the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. They often went on trips to Europe, employed a full-time housekeeper, and even went snowboarding by helicopter in Canada. "We live in a bubble," Evan wrote in the letter asking for the BMW.
Source: LA Weekly
Spiegel went on to study product design at Stanford (his father's alma mater), where he met future Snapchat cofounders Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy.
"We weren't cool," Murphy later told Forbes, "so we tried to build things to be cool."
Source: Forbes
The three were members of the Kappa Sigma fraternity. Spiegel was social chair, and judging from leaked emails, he was quite the partier.
In 2014, emails from Spiegel's days at Stanford were leaked. In expletive-laden messages to members of his fraternity, Spiegel made offensive jokes about having sex with women.
Once the emails were publicized, Spiegel issued an apology.
"I'm sorry I wrote them at the time and I was jerk to have written them," he said in 2014. "They in no way reflect who I am today or my views towards women."
While at Stanford, a friend of the family let Spiegel sit in on a graduate-level class on entrepreneurship and venture capital. In that class he heard talks from tech luminaries like Google CEO Eric Schmidt and YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley.
Source: LA Weekly
Spiegel befriended Intuit founder Scott Cook after he gave a talk at one class. Cook ended up letting Spiegel work on a product Intuit planned to release in India while he worked on his undergrad.
Cook ended up becoming an early Snapchat investor because he was so impressed with Spiegel. But he thought the idea behind Snapchat was stupid. "I didn't believe in the product," Cook recently told BI. "Who needs disappearing photos? I thought he was dead wrong on the business."
Source: Business Insider
Spiegel dropped out of Stanford just a few credits short of graduation to work on Snapchat full time. The team developed the bulk of the disappearing messages app, which was first called Picaboo, in 2012 while headquartered at Spiegel's dad's house in the Palisades.
Though Snapchat eventually moved to offices on the Venice boardwalk, Spiegel lived at his dad's house for years, in part because "the rent is cheap."
Reggie Brown filed a lawsuit against Spiegel and Murphy in 2013 after he was forced out of the company and not given equity. The lawsuit was eventually settled, and Snapchat paid Brown $157.5 million to disappear.
Source: The alleged betrayal in these photos, texts, and emails cost Snapchat $158 million (Business Insider)
Spiegel moved out of his dad's house in November 2014 and bought his own three-bedroom house in Brentwood for $3.3 million.
It wasn't long before would-be acquirers came knocking on Spiegel's door to buy Snapchat. He famously rebuffed a $3 billion offer from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2013.
Shortly after Spiegel turned down the offer from Zuckerberg, Facebook tried to clone Snapchat with a failed app called Poke.
Source: Forbes
As Snapchat's user base and valuation continued to swell, Spiegel quickly became a bona fide celebrity in the worlds of tech and media. Here he is hanging out with George Lucas and Vice CEO Shane Smith during the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in October 2014.
In 2014, Spiegel's startup loaned he and cofounder Bobby Murphy $5 million each.
Source: SEC filing
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After Snapchat completed a big funding round in June 2015, Spiegel bought himself a Ferrari.
Spiegel was romantically linked with pop superstar Taylor Swift for a brief time. The two reportedly met in December 2013 at a New Year's Eve party.
Source: LaineyGossip
Spiegel has been fascinated with the music industry for years, and former Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton is Snap's board chairman. Spiegel was reportedly interested in buying Big Machine, the record label that represents Swift, though the deal never went through.
Source: New York Post
Spiegel started dating supermodel Miranda Kerr during the summer of 2015. They first met at a 2014 dinner for Louis Vuitton.
In May 2016, the couple purchased a 7,164-square-foot house that had been owned by Harrison Ford for $12 million.
Things moved quickly after that: the power couple announced that they were engaged in July 2016.
Spiegel cares about fashion more than most tech CEOs. He made headlines in October 2015 for appearing on the cover of Vogue Italy.
Source: Vogue Italy
He's a licensed helicopter pilot who also enjoys flower arranging. His signature shirt is a James Perse white v-neck, which retails for $60.
He once told GQ that the shirt has been a "staple since high school."
Source: GQ
Spiegel highly values secrecy in his business dealings as well as his personal life. Snap employees often don't know about products the company is working on until they're announced publicly.
Sources:
What it’s like to work at Snapchat, one of the most secretive companies in tech (Business Insider)How Snapchat secretly bought a struggling startup, then bet the future on it (Business Insider)Spiegel often moves across the company’s network of Venice Beach outposts in a black car flanked by his security detail. His security cost $890,399 in 2016.
Sources:
What it’s like to work at Snapchat, one of the most secretive companies in tech (Business Insider)SEC filingsIn February 2016, Snapchat loaned Spiegel $15 million. Snapchat raised $175 million the following month at a $16 billion valuation, and Spiegel repaid his outstanding loans in full later that year.
Source: SEC filings
In September 2016, Spiegel renamed Snapchat to Snap Inc. and called it a "camera company." He also unveiled camera-equipped sunglasses called Spectacles.
Source: WSJ Magazine
The 26-year-old has been named the youngest self-made billionaire in the world by Forbes for the past two years. He has an estimated net worth of about $4 billion based on Snap's value as a public company.
Source: Forbes
Snap went public on Thursday, March 2 at a roughly $33 billion valuation. Spiegel instantly added about $1.6 billion to his net worth based on Snap's 44% jump in share price.
Facebook began to copy Snapchat's core features in Instagram and across all of its other apps around the later half of 2016. During a February interview, Miranda Kerr expressed frustration about Facebook's strategy. "Can they not be innovative?" she said. "Do they have to steal all of my partner's ideas?"
Source: The Times
Snap shares cratered more than 20% when the company missed Wall Street's expectations for its first quarterly earnings on May 10. Spiegel's net worth immediately dropped about $1 billion.
Source: Business Insider
He earned a $503,205 salary in 2016, plus a $1 million bonus. His base salary has been reduced to $1 now that Snap has gone public, but his ownership of the company makes him worth roughly $4 billion on paper.
Source: SEC filings
Going forward, Spiegel's mission at Snap is to "reinvent the camera." He has positioned his company as the anti-Facebook for communicating with only your closest friends, and he recently told the LA Times that he wants to "inspire creation."
Source: LA Times
During Snap's first-ever quarterly conference call with investors on May 10, Spiegel finally addressed Facebook's relentless copying of Snapchat. "At the end of the day, just because Yahoo has a search box, it doesn't mean they’re Google," he said.
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Source: Business Insider
Get the latest Snap stock price here.
