Evan Spiegel

Evan Spiegel was born June 4, 1990, in Los Angeles to two lawyers, and grew up in Pacific Palisades attending Crossroads, a private school known for producing entertainment-industry kids. He enrolled at Stanford to study product design, taking extra classes at Otis College of Art and Design and the Art Center College of Design alongside his coursework. In April 2011, a design-class assignment asked him to invent something that did not exist yet, and Spiegel proposed a messaging app where photos would disappear once viewed, the opposite of what every other platform of the era was built to do. He left Stanford the following year, without finishing his degree, to build it full time, going back to complete the coursework only in 2018.

Spiegel built the app, first called Picaboo, with Stanford classmates Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown, and by the end of 2012, renamed Snapchat, it had a million daily users on the strength of an idea competitors had dismissed as pointless: a photo that vanished instead of sitting online forever. In November 2013, Mark Zuckerberg offered three billion dollars to buy the company outright, and Spiegel, then 23, turned it down, betting he could build something worth more on his own. Snap added Stories, filters and an advertising business, then augmented-reality glasses called Spectacles, and went public in March 2017 at a valuation near 24 billion, making Spiegel, at 26, one of the youngest chief executives ever to run a public company. Instagram launched its own version of Stories within a year of the IPO and has out-executed Snapchat's growth since.

Reggie Brown, the third person in the room when the idea took shape, sued in 2013 after discovering he had no equity in the company at all. Snap settled in 2014 without disclosing terms, and the company's 2017 IPO filing revealed the number: 157.5 million dollars, paid to a co-founder the official company history had quietly written out. That same year, emails Spiegel wrote as a Kappa Sigma pledge at Stanford leaked to the press, joking about getting girls too drunk to say no and mocking gay men, language he called mortifying and apologized for immediately. The apology did not erase the pattern the emails suggested: a founder who built his fortune on a promise of vanishing content had, years earlier, written things he clearly hoped would vanish too, and did not.

Spiegel married the Australian model Miranda Kerr in 2017, and the couple had three sons together and, in 2022, paid off the entire graduating class's student debt at Otis College of Art and Design. Snap's stock has traded far below its IPO price for most of the years since 2017, even as its user base has kept growing, and Wall Street has never settled on whether the company is an enduring platform or a feature Meta can copy faster than Snap can invent new ones. Spiegel remains chief executive at 36, still controlling the company through a share structure that gave public shareholders no vote when Snap went public in 2017, the first major US IPO to try it.

Evan Spiegel's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Snapchat company
  Ephemeral photo-messaging app, renamed from Picaboo 2011
• Snapchat Stories other
  Disappearing 24-hour photo feed later copied by Instagram 2013
• Spectacles invention
  Camera-equipped sunglasses, Snap's first hardware product 2016
• Snap Inc. IPO other
  First major US public offering with no-vote shares for investors 2017

• June 4, 1990 aged 0 Born in Los Angeles, California
• April 2011 aged 20 Proposes a disappearing-photo app for a Stanford design class
• 2012 aged ~22 Leaves Stanford without finishing his degree to build the app full time
• December 2012 aged 22 Snapchat reaches one million daily users
• November 2013 aged 23 Turns down Mark Zuckerberg's three-billion-dollar buyout offer
• May 2014 aged 23 Leaked fraternity emails become public and he apologizes
• September 2014 aged 24 Settles Reggie Brown's co-founder lawsuit
• March 2, 2017 aged 26 Snap Inc. goes public
• May 27, 2017 aged 26 Marries Miranda Kerr

• Mark Zuckerberg b. 1984
  Co-founder of Facebook who built the world's largest social media platform and reshaped global communication. rejected buyout offer from
• Sheryl Sandberg b. 1969
  Former COO of Meta who wrote Lean In and became a prominent voice on women in leadership. rival
• Reed Hastings b. 1960
  Co-founder of Netflix who disrupted the entertainment industry by pioneering streaming video. contemporary
• Tim Cook b. 1960
  CEO of Apple who steered the company to become the world's most valuable after Steve Jobs's death. contemporary