For someone that runs a social media empire, he sure is private!
If you’re living in this century, then the name Evan Spiegel should ring a bell. And if it doesn’t, then maybe two of the closest things to him will: Snapchat and Miranda Kerr. But besides being married to one of the most recognizable faces in the modeling world and co-founding one of the most successful social media platforms, what do know about the guy?
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The man has one post on his Instagram account (not verified; no one knows if it’s him) and only 25 posts on Twitter (verified)—but even these are only retweets.
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So Spiegel actually had a lavish and (let’s be honest) enviable childhood. He’s the son of two successful lawyers, both of who were Ivy League-educated. Naturally, he experienced the best that money could buy, including luxury cars and a private education. When he was 16, he was given a Cadillac Escalade, which he eventually traded in for a BMW 550i because he thought it would be more fuel-efficient.
His early years of education were spent inside the walls of Crossroads in Santa Monica, a school also attended by Kate Hudson, Jonah Hill and Gwyneth Paltrow. He then went on to study product design at Stanford, but—like a handful of other now-billionaires—he dropped out a few credits short of graduation.
Why? Because he was already developing Snapchat.
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By 2012, co-founders Spiegel, Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy had already developed the bulk of Snapchat. Brown, however, sued Spiegel and Murphy the following year for forcing him out of the company without equity. The case was eventually settled for—breathe—US$157.5 million.
For a while, it really didn’t seem like money was the goal as Spiegel turned down a US$3 billion offer from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in 2013. At the time, he said it was because selling would be an uninteresting short term gain. But then he delivered a speech at the USC Marshall Undergraduate Commencement exercise in 2015 and he was a little more eloquent with his reason.
“The fastest way to figure out if you are doing something truly important to you,” he said, “is to have someone offer you a bunch of money to part with it.”
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In the summer of 2015, Spiegel started to date former Victoria Secret model Miranda Kerr (because the woman knows how to choose her men). In July 2016, the two announced their engagement and officially tied the knot in May 2017.
Since 2014, Forbes has named Spiegel the youngest billionaire with Murphy (two years older) right behind him. According to the publication, each Snapchat co-founder is worth a whooping US$3.1 billion.
Let that sink in: Three point one billion US dollars.
Image via Millennialug
And if that isn’t enough—if you think about it—he owns your nudes.
Art Cara Gamo
