Snap! And the billions roll in
HE HAS pop-star looks, a supermodel wife and last year became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire thanks to an app which, if you’re older than 20, you’re likely to be clueless about.
His annual pay cheque is
£500 million. Home is a tasteful Los Angeles beach house overlooking the Pacific and in the garage purrs a racing red Ferrari.
Small wonder Evan Spiegel permanently sports the wolfish grin of a man who’s just snaffled the last roast potato.
Spiegel is the founder and chief executive of Snapchat, a photo messaging service which, like a lot of successful internet applications, is based on a concept so simple you wonder why it was ever invented.
Users send and receive pictures to each other’s devices and, rather than remain there, they delete seconds after they have been viewed.
Launched from a Stanford University dormitory in 2011, the company spread across US university campuses via word-of-mouth quicker than the ILOVEYOU computer virus, ratcheting up 250 million users within a year.
It floated on the New York Stock Exchange last year and now has a market capitalisation just north of £12bn, attracting 188 million users a day.
In common with all tech tycoons, Spiegel claims to be leading a revolution. What you post on most other forms of social media stays there forever.
Snapchat’s content is ephemeral, making it, he says, an antidote to that anxiety. It is an alternative to the permanent.
But in most other respects, its founder is cut from a different cloth from his peers. While Silicon Valley types tend to be pimply, dishevelled sorts in ill-fitting jeans lacking basic social skills, Spiegel is a fresh-faced charmer who cuts a dash in designer threads.
Nor is he publicity-adverse. Married to Aussie undercrackers model Miranda Kerr, the pair are a fixture in glossy fashion mags and on the LA party circuit.
His is no rags-to-riches story either. Growing up on the fringes of Los Angeles, Spiegel and his two sisters wanted for nothing. Both parents were lawyers – his mother quit once her children came along – and lived high on the hog.
They were regulars at the country club and holidays were taken in Europe or Hawaii. There were fancy cars, personal tutors and housekeepers. They even had a chef.
While no geek, young Spiegel had a knack for computers. By 11, he could build one from scratch. When his parents split in 2007, their divorce got messy.
Publicly available court documents reveal Spiegel hardly covered himself in glory, demanding a £50 000 5 series BMW, reasoning it was more fuel efficient than his Cadillac.
At
Stanford
University, he was quite the party animal. He was social chairperson of his fraternity, which ended up getting kicked off campus for its raucous behaviour.
The idea for disappearing pictures was cooked up by his friend, Reggie Brown. With another student, Bobby Murphy, they launched Snapchat, originally called Picaboo, in 2011.
Ruthlessly, Spiegel and Murphy ousted Brown – he received a £122m settlement in 2014 after a lengthy legal dispute– and the pair gave up their studies to concentrate on the business.
By November 2012, Snapchat’s users had shared more than a billion photos, averaging 20 million shares a day.
Sensing competition, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg offered Spiegel £50m for the company.
He declined. The next year, he offered £2bn. Again Spiegel told him to shove it.
Zuckerberg retaliated by launching a similar app, called Poke. That Snapchat not only saw it off, but continued to thrive is mostly, they say, down to its founder’s dogged tenacity. His cherubic features belie a hardened operator.
When he hooked up with Kerr in 2015 at a Louis Vuitton party, Spiegel was living with his dad. The couple bought a £10m mansion which had belonged to Harrison Ford two years ago, and their 2016 wedding (the bride wore Dior) was featured in Vogue.
Spiegel’s son was born in May. A gilded life? Certainly. But as the cocky young shaver acknowledges: “I am a young, white, educated male. I got really, really lucky. And life isn’t fair.” – Daily Mail