Last Updated on April 21, 2022

Evan is the co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc, the company that created and promoted the messenger Snapchat. Today the press calls Evan the youngest billionaire in the world, with an impressive net worth of 11.7 billion dollars

How rich is Evan Spiegel?

Evan Spiegel was born on June 3, 1990 in Los Angeles and grew up in Pacific Palisades. After graduating from Crossroads School in Santa Monica, he attended Stanford University. Along the way, he took numerous design courses and at the same time completed an unpaid internship at Red Bull (Dietrich Mateschitz). Additionally, he worked as a paid intern at a biomedical company and as a professional trainer in Cape Town and at Intuit. It wasn’t long before he developed his successful app, Snapchat. Through the messaging app, he became one of the richest people in the world. Evan Spiegel’s estimated fortune is 11.7 billion dollars.

Foundation of Snapchat

He founded a few online portals, which were not particularly successful: FutureFreshman was intended to make it easier for students from U.S. universities to apply to potential employers.

After that, he developed Snapchat – by accident. It was, in fact, a course project intended for his product design studies at Stanford. The app for iOS and Android was then developed by Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy. However, Brown sued both Spiegel and Murphy, claiming the idea was largely his.

In 2012, Spiegel had dropped out of college so he could devote all his time to his Snapchat project. Along the way, a settlement was also fought out in which it was conceded that the idea of Snapchat originally came from Brown.

However, there were downsides to the beginning of his career. In 2014, private emails from Evan Spiegel were shown on a blog. In them, there were mostly homophobic and misogynistic statements. He later apologized for these statements.

Snapchat Inc. was renamed Snap Inc. and has been listed on the stock exchange since 2017. At its stock market debut, the company received a valuation of $34 billion. The technology and social media company is based in Venice, USA, and has over 3,000 employees.

The financial breakthrough

The breakthrough came in April 2012, when the first investor invested around 500 000 dollars. Snapchat then became increasingly popular, especially among the younger target group, and by the end of the year there were already 500,000 active users. Now there was even a purchase offer from Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg offered Evan Spiegel and Murphy 3.2 billion dollars, but both had declined. In doing so, both had done themselves a favor, because the app was becoming more and more popular and new features gave it further opportunities for monetization. In 2016, Snapchat was valued at $16 billion in the meantime.

One reason for this is in particular because advertisers have gained easy access to the younger target group through Snapchat. Every user is confronted with advertising, and there is no way to hide it.

The app generates terrific revenues through advertising. Thus, Evan Spiegel allowed himself an annual salary of about 520 million euros. The majority comes from a share package because his official annual salary is 100,000 dollars. Evan Spiegel is one of the richest people in the world.

Attacks from Facebook were unsuccessful

Snapchat’s developers had a feel for which functions were better received by the target group. Not even Facebook was able to counter this, as its own app called Slingshot was discontinued after only a short time. With Snapchat Memories and Stories, there were again functions that stood out from all the other apps. Stories are now available on almost every platform – Instagram, Facebook, or even dating apps. With Snap Inc. Evan Spiegel became rich, it has helped him to a billion-dollar fortune.