← Good Bad Billionaire
Good Bad Billionaire
Evan Spiegel: Snapchat fratboy
00:46:37
How disappearing messages app Snapchat made Evan Spiegel a billionaire at 25
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- [00:00]
Simon Jack
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
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- [00:27]
Simon Jack
You don't look like.
- [00:28]
Zing Singh
Please see, I'll take that as a compliment.
- [00:30]
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- [01:08]
Zing Singh
Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire. Episodes are released weekly wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the uk, you can listen to the latest episode a week early, first on BBC Sounds.
- [01:19]
Simon Jack
It's April 2012 and we are in sunny California, in deep inside that hotbed of future billionaires, Stanford University. It's just three weeks until classes break up and final year students are close to graduation. But one young man sitting right at the back of his computing class has lost interest in the lecture. He's staring at his phone, obsessed with an app. He's not sending messages on Facebook, Twitter, or even Snapchat. Actually, he created Snapchat. He's looking at his Wells Fargo banking app. He's waiting for a deposit. And there it is. $485,000, an investment that values his company at over $4 million. The moment the money hits the account, the student gets up, walks to the front of the class and tells his professor he's quitting. He's 21 years old and he's just become a millionaire and a college dropout in the same minute. But he's only just beginning.
- [02:14]
Zing Singh
Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Each episode we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made money.
- [02:21]
Simon Jack
We take them from zero to a million and then on from a million to a billion.
- [02:25]
Zing Singh
My name is Zing Singh and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.
- [02:28]
Simon Jack
And my name is Simon Jack. I'm the BBC's business editor and on.
- [02:31]
Zing Singh
This episode we are talking about Evan Spiegel, who is currently worth just under oh $3 billion.
- [02:38]
Simon Jack
He's co creator of Snapchat, a social media app for sending disappearing photos, videos and Texts.
- [02:43]
Zing Singh
Now in 2025, over 400 million people use Snapchat every day and over 900 million people worldwide use it monthly.
- [02:51]
Simon Jack
Its highest user, this is actually in India where it has over 200 million users, followed by the US where over 100 million people now use it.
- [03:00]
Zing Singh
Spiegel and his friend Bobby Murphy launched Snapchat in 2011 while they were both studying at Stanford University. And they soon dropped out.
- [03:07]
Simon Jack
Yeah, Badge of honor dropping out within four years. At just 25, Evan would become the world's youngest self made billionaire.
- [03:15]
Zing Singh
So let's tell a story starting from zero to his first million. Evan Spiegel was born in June 1990 in Los Angeles, California. He's the eldest of three children. Both his parents are lawyers. His mother, Melissa was actually a Harvard Law graduate who practiced tax law before having kids. And his dad John, meanwhile, went to Yale Law and is now a partner at big firm where he's represented clients like Warner Brothers and one of our previous billionaires, Sergey Brin.
- [03:44]
Simon Jack
So fair to say, Evan Spiegel grew up in a privileged household. The house he grew up in cost $2 million and was in the famously affluent neighborhood of of Pacific Palisades, just east of Malibu in Los Angeles. But there's one thing he didn't have growing up. His parents didn't let him watch tv.
- [04:01]
Zing Singh
Which is odd given the amount of screen time people now spend on apps like Snapchat.
- [04:06]
Simon Jack
Exactly. Instead, they encouraged him to read, which he said did wonders for his imagination. I had a lot of time on my hands, so I like to build stuff, he said.
- [04:14]
Zing Singh
Evan went to a very expensive private school called Crossroads for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica. Now it's known for famous alumni like Jonah Hill, Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow. It costs tens, thousands per academic year. And while Evans described himself as someone who had trouble fitting in at school, he says that even if he wasn't confident in himself, he was always confident in his ideas.
- [04:36]
Simon Jack
He didn't play sports. Apart from a bit of tennis. Most of his free time was spent surprise, surprise. Like many of our billionaires in the.
- [04:42]
Zing Singh
Computer lab, he says he'd first been exposed to computers when he was about six years old when his godfather brought over one of the early Macintoshes to show our family. By the time he was in sixth grade. So at about 11 or 12. Evan was demanding his own computer, but his mother said he could only have one if he built it himself. Now we know he liked to build stuff, so he did just that. He did have some help from a school teacher. And he later joked that his best friend in middle school was the computer teacher, Dan. This actually reminds me a lot of Bill Gates. You know, if you remember the episode we did on Bill Gates, his computer teacher encouraged him to play around on the only computer available at that school.
- [05:21]
Simon Jack
And he was lucky enough to have a school which had a computer in the 1970s when Bill Gates was starting out. So this is a bit of a geeky, perhaps lonely childhood, but he seems to have come out of his shell a bit as a high school teenager. There he landed himself an unpaid internship with Red Bull where he racked up expenses. And when his parents divorced when he was 16, he went to live with his dad. And there he developed a reputation for throwing what he claims were notorious parties.
- [05:46]
Zing Singh
And you know, he definitely used his parents divorce to his advantage. Apparently for the most part, he was happy living with his dad, John. Except when John refused to get him the $75,000 BMW he wanted, he wrote his parents a letter asking for the car to validate. When he didn't get the car, he briefly moved back in with his mum until the BMW was his.
- [06:06]
Simon Jack
Playing the parents off against each other in the divorce setting. It's an age old trick. Some brat vibes coming out here.
- [06:12]
Zing Singh
Yeah, exactly. Although you know, not every brat of divorced parents manages to get the BMW of his dreams.
- [06:17]
Simon Jack
And maybe we'll come back to this, but I do think that these great risk takers that we've talked about, a lot of them from California, quite a lot of them came from comfortable backgrounds. And I always think that you do have that license to take a few more risks because you do have that cushion.
- [06:33]
Zing Singh
Yeah, you have an appetite for it.
- [06:35]
Simon Jack
So negotiations, expenses, computer geekery. We're seeing the makings of a billionaire here. And sure enough, his next move is a classic right from the American billionaire playbook. In 2008, he goes to study at Stanford University. As we know, Stanford, especially in the late 2000s, early 2010s when he was there, had a reputation for being a hub for these entrepreneurial techie students. The founders of Instagram, which was released in 2010, met while at Stanford, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They were Stanford graduate students and Evan was studying product design, but seemed keener to secure a reputation for throwing parties. Just a word on Stanford. It's quite a conservative type place. People aren't crazy. But he was a bit of a frat boy.
- [07:17]
Zing Singh
Yeah, he was. He joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity and eventually became social chair, AKA the person responsible for throwing parties. Now tech journalist Billy Gallagher, who went to university with Evan, described him as a big presence. He says people's view of Stanford as a nerdier school is not necessarily inaccurate. There's only a small percentage of students who are really outgoing and vibrant. Evan was a central character in throwing many, many parties. He's a showman. He always wants to be doing it bigger and better and bolder. It was always more, more, more.
- [07:47]
Simon Jack
And it was at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house that Evan first met his future Snapchat co founder, Bobby Murphy. Bobby was two years Evan's senior. He was majoring in maths and computational science. The pair soon became close. Evan asked Bobby for help with computer science and Bobby being impressed with Evan's T shirt designs for their fraternity.
- [08:08]
Zing Singh
So Bobby recruited Evan to do web design for a project inspired by Google Circles. Now if you don't remember what Google Circles was, it was a very short lived and ultimately unsuccessful online social network which was finally wrapped up and put in the dirt by 2019. Now unsurprisingly, Bobby and Evan's project inspired by a failed social network didn't go anywhere. But this is the start of a professional partnership that would go on to make both men billionaires. And they'd soon try something else.
- [08:35]
Simon Jack
If at first you don't succeed, have another go. But meanwhile, Evan was enjoying his product design course. He said it combined his love of making things and learning the process for making new products. But in particular he called one class which he sat in on the game changer. It was called Entrepreneurship in Venture Capital and was primarily taught to mba, that's Masters of Business Administration students. A guy called Scott Cook was the guest lecturer. Now he was the boss of a big multinational company called Intuit, which makes business software. Cook himself is a billionaire worth about 2 billion, then at about 8 billion. Now obviously interested in billionaires as I hope everyone listening here is, or by self selecting sample they are, Evan took the opportunity to talk to Scott. He says after class I talked to him and basically begged him for a job. So he gave me an internship at Intuit that really changed my trajectory. And he worked there as a paid intern for a month in a small team of three or four. And he came away with one key, understanding that a really small team could build software used all around the world.
- [09:36]
Zing Singh
So back at Kappa Sigma Fraternity House, Evan and Bobby again focused on their own company. They were developing a web app to help prospective college students manage their university application process. They called it Future Freshmen. Kind of a bit of a mouthful, but in total, they worked on it for 18 months. Evan did the design, Bobby did the engineering. Evan posted online that he put in $2,500 of his own money, and the pair took it pretty seriously. They worked side by side, they lived on takeaways, they slept on site, and they launched a product in the summer of 2010. Loads of features that they thought were really good, and it totally flopped, Evan said.
- [10:14]
Simon Jack
The pair soon realized there were some crucial issues with Future Freshmen, the biggest being they hadn't accounted for the competition. There was already a big established company offering a similar service that had a massive distribution advantage in that it was being recommended by college counsellors. But the pair enjoyed working together. Their different skill sets apparently made them a good fit. And they were about to stumble on that billion dollar idea.
- [10:38]
Zing Singh
In the spring of 2011, Evan had just got back from studying abroad in Cape Town, South Africa, and he was hanging out in his room with Reggie Brown, one of his frat bros. It seems that Brown had sent a message he wished he hadn't. Don't know what that could be. And he said something along the lines of, man, it'd be really cool to be able to send disappearing photos. Bing at that moment was the genesis of Snapchat. In fact, it would lead not only to the creation of the app with hundreds of millions of users, but also to a million lawsuit.
- [11:08]
Simon Jack
But back in 2011, Evan was immediately struck with the idea. So he and Bobby started building a disappearing messages app that they originally called Peekaboo. The name, of course, a pun on the children's game Peekaboo. Now you see me, now you don't. You get the idea. So as before, Evan was on design, Bobby on tech, and now Reggie also joined them in a marketing role. Later, court documents. That sounds ominous. Will show Bobby Murphy as chief technology officer, Spiegel as chief exec, and Reggie Brown as chief marketing officer.
- [11:36]
Zing Singh
Evan said they made a few strong design choices early on, including wanting Peekaboo to be the fastest way to share a moment by having it open straight up into the camera. They also allowed users to control how long their images could be seen for. And very soon, they were ready to get feedback on the idea. So Evan presented the concept for Peekaboo to his product design class.
- [11:56]
Simon Jack
It did not go down too well. Evan has said that everyone in class called It a terrible idea. They thought that not only would nobody use it, but the only people who do will use it for sexting, sending sexual images or messages. There was a venture capitalist sitting in on the class, and he said it could be interesting if Evan made the photos permanent and partnered with the supermarket Best Buy. Spiegel claims he nearly threw up at this idea.
- [12:21]
Zing Singh
I mean, if I was in that product design class and a guy, a frat bro, came up with the app to make photos disappear, I would probably think the worst. I would have thought it would just be for sexting.
- [12:33]
Simon Jack
Yeah. And in fact, I can't imagine, apart from that application, why you would think this is a good idea.
- [12:39]
Zing Singh
I think the reason why Snap, or Snapchat, if you want to give it its full name, eventually took off is because. And I don't know if maybe Evan was really thinking about this at the time, but it kind of hit on this idea that when you post something on the Internet, it lives forever, and there's something attached to that that feels a kind of icky. And I think by the time the 2010s rolled around, people were starting to feel like, oh, God, what's posted on the Internet is going to follow me around for the rest of my life.
- [13:04]
Simon Jack
Right.
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Zing Singh
And Snapchat came about at the exact point where people were reconsidering that.
- [13:08]
Simon Jack
Yeah. I've got two daughters, and I know that they sort of suddenly dawned on them or, you know, with a little bit of nudge from me. I have to say that, by the way, you know, this is going to be on your permanent record, kid. So be careful what you put out there. Who knows if it's going to follow you through life. But whatever anyone else thought, Evan and Bobby were convinced of the idea. Rather than being for those small number of moments you generally want to look back on, they saw their app as the place to put everything else, all the stuff that could and should be quickly forgotten. Just like, I guess, a normal conversation.
- [13:38]
Zing Singh
Yeah, exactly. So they persevered. They moved their operations into Evan's dad's house to continue development. But there was one piece of feedback they realized they'd have to work on. The fact that users could just take screenshots of the photos before they disappeared. Right.
- [13:52]
Simon Jack
Yeah. Which is something they did struggle with. And the solution they came up was for the app to detect if someone took a screenshot and then send a notification to the person who'd sent the original message, letting them know that, by the way, someone screenshotted this.
- [14:04]
Zing Singh
And that's pretty Smart. As they prepared for launch, Evan and Bobby renamed their company Toyopa Group after the street where they were working now. Reggie later claimed he thought they'd started a new company together, but Evan and Bobby had actually renamed the existing future freshmen and retained their 6040 ownership split.
- [14:22]
Simon Jack
That's interesting. That reminds me a little bit of the Facebook genesis, when some people don't get the ownership stake they thought they deserved. Evan designed a logo, an image of a ghost they nicknamed Ghost Face Chiller in reference to the Wu Tang Clan rapper Ghostface Killer. And actually it's the same recognizable ghost logo that Snap still uses today.
- [14:42]
Zing Singh
So they have a company, a logo, a product. They are ready to unleash their app into the world.
- [14:47]
Simon Jack
Yeah. The first iteration of Picaboo launched on the Apple app store in July 2011. But the public response mimicked that in a way. Of Evan's classmates, there was little interest.
- [14:59]
Zing Singh
By the end of summer, they still only had a total of 127 users. That is not very much at all.
- [15:04]
Simon Jack
No.
- [15:04]
Zing Singh
In fact, the only interest in them came from a photobook company also called Picaboo, who sent out a cease and desist demanding that they stop using the name. Evan later said it was maybe one of the best things that ever happened to us, as that was what led them to rename the app Snapchat.
- [15:19]
Simon Jack
Yeah, interesting power of a name. I thought Peekaboo actually worked pretty well. But before they even got round to changing the name to Snapchat, Evan and Bobby fell out with Reggie and and pushed him out of the business. And in September 2011, Snapchat renamed, launched in the App Store again.
- [15:34]
Zing Singh
There was no immediate uptake of the app among users, but after they shared an updated version for the iPhone with about 20 friends in September, they did start to see a little bit of growth. Now, those new users turned out to be concentrated around a high school in Orange county that was attended by Evan's cousin. Now, he'd heard about Snapchat from Evan's mother, Melissa, and from him. It had spread through school and onto other high schools in Southern California. This actually reminds me quite a lot of one of our other billionaires, Whitney Wolfe heard, who went around different university campuses shilling Tinder to people, and it all got taken up through social circles.
- [16:10]
Simon Jack
Yeah, the grossing usage was paired with some unusual spikes in activity. They peaked between 8am and 3pm, basically while these teens were getting to school and when they were in class. For these kids, I suppose the app was like passing a little note around in class.
- [16:24]
Zing Singh
Yeah, exactly. It was maybe even easier. You sent a photo in three taps. Once you looked, evidence disappeared forever. The teacher can't catch you and see what the note says. Usage doubled over the Christmas holidays as students got given new iPhones. And that growth just continued. By January 2012, it was at 20,000. By April, it was over a hundred thousand. As Snapchat grew, it started to gain press attention.
- [16:47]
Simon Jack
Some of that attention there was unwanted.
- [16:50]
Zing Singh
Yeah, that's right. In May, the New York Times ran a story that associated Snapchat with sexting, which Evan declined to comment on, instead emailing that he was, in his words, completely absorbed with end of year projects at school.
- [17:02]
Simon Jack
Now, I'm a bit older than you, so I'm going to say that Snapchat was slightly below my radar, both in my technical skills and my age bracket. Was it associated with that?
- [17:14]
Zing Singh
It definitely was. At a time, I think, as with any kind of technology, people are always going to figure out a way to misuse it and to bully and harass people. And the fact that Snapchat sent disappearing messages meant that if you wanted to use it for, I guess, slightly dodgy, nefarious ends, you could get away with it.
- [17:35]
Simon Jack
It was helping you cover your own tracks. Exactly, yeah. It should be said, though, that the first press release for Snapchat, when it was still floundering as peekaboo, could be read as playing up the potential for sexting. Included the line, toss out those old last season photo messaging apps, because now Picaboo lets you and your girlfriends send photos for peeks and not keeps. Evan would later express frustration about this pigeonholing of the app. He points to the data they already had about their users. People sending 50, 100 snaps back and forth all day long. There's only so many genital pics you can send, certainly not 50 or 100 a day. They must be using it for something else as well. In fact, what stood out about Snapchat for early investors was the fact they had a year's worth of data to show that once you started using the app, they didn't stop. That's crucial.
- [18:21]
Zing Singh
Yep. User retention or addiction, if you want to look at it another way. By spring 2012, the boys were desperately in need of investors. The growth in users meant Evan and Bobby's server bills had shot up to about $5,000 a month. Evan was able to cover some of these bills of ten grand his grandfather left him in a will, and more money given to him from his dad. And Bobby also had a coding job on the side but the bills used up half his paycheck.
- [18:45]
Simon Jack
Yeah, but Evan and Bobby got lucky because some of their earliest investors came to them.
- [18:51]
Zing Singh
What they found was that parents of teenagers who were using the app saw its potential. So the app, being out in the world, being used by people's sons and daughters, worked almost like an advert to.
- [19:01]
Simon Jack
These investors, particularly in rich Southern California, where basically there's plenty of money sloshing around and people were looking for the next big thing.
- [19:09]
Zing Singh
That's right. And first came a guy called Michael Linton, a big time Hollywood exec who was CEO and chairman at Sony Pictures. Him and his wife Jamie noticed their daughters using Snapchat and they were impressed. They tracked Evan down, they were even more impressed by him and his vision. And they provided Snapchat with something called bridge funding.
- [19:28]
Simon Jack
Yeah, so bridge funding is basically a bridge to get you from where you are now to something in the future. They obviously thought that if they gave them the money to keep going, at some point other investors would come in, refinance them, and they could pay back the bridge funding. It's still a risk, it's still a big risk because you don't know you're going to find the other end of that bridge. But it's a form of funding to tide you over until you get someone with even deeper pockets to try and refinance the company. Company.
- [19:52]
Zing Singh
So it's not free money. It is a short term loan, definitely.
- [19:54]
Simon Jack
So Linton ended up serving on Snapchat's board, but the next investor who tracked them down provided some serious backing. What we're just talking about, this was.
- [20:03]
Zing Singh
Another Stanford connection, an alumnus called Jeremy Liu, who worked at a venture capital firm called Lightspeed. He'd noticed the growth of Snapchat and he wanted in. But he initially had trouble tracking down who actually owned the app. Evan and Bobby hadn't provided any contact details on the site, and although they were on LinkedIn, they hadn't listed any staff either. Now, eventually, Leo managed to message them on another social media app, Facebook.
- [20:28]
Simon Jack
That's quite interesting, isn't it? Because if they have to track you down, by the time they do, you know that they're really interested because they went to the effort of actually finding you. At the time, Evan and Bobby had been getting a lot of spammy messages, but Jeremy's profile pic was him with the then president Barack Obama. So they thought this guy must be legit. And he was. And he was soon responsible for that $485,000 we talked about at the beginning. That investment that made Evan quit Stanford as a millionaire.
- [20:56]
Zing Singh
Lightspeed's investment valued Snapchat at $4.25 million. And Evan at the time said that $485,000 was like, in his words, infinity money. He said he felt a huge obligation to the investors and that when he walked to the front of the class to quit, he told his professor, I'm just so sorry, I can't continue. So at least he apologized. He was just three credits away from graduating. He even attended the ceremony a few weeks later, where he was handed an empty diploma, something he says he later regretted doing.
- [21:25]
Simon Jack
While he didn't get a degree in April 2012, Evan Spiegel was a millionaire.
- [21:40]
Zing Singh
America is changing and so is the world.
- [21:45]
Simon Jack
But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [21:53]
Zing Singh
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
- [21:55]
Simon Jack
Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global story.
- [21:59]
Zing Singh
Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [22:05]
Simon Jack
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [22:15]
Zing Singh
So he's 21 years old, he's a Stanford dropout, and he's officially a millionaire. Oh, my God. If I was a 21 year university student and I'd just been handed that amount of money, I would go on a round the world trip. I would take two friends completely free. I just have a girls trip, like the most expensive gap year you could think of.
- [22:37]
Simon Jack
I like to think that what I would have done with it is buy shares in the early company Nvidia, at which point I'd be a billionaire by now myself.
- [22:46]
Zing Singh
That's so boring, Simon.
- [22:48]
Simon Jack
I have daydreams about if I just bought this and then I'd sold it then and used the money for that and put it in there. I bought Apple and then sold out of Apple and put it in Nvidia and da da, da. And then I'd be, I'd be as the richest man in the world and.
- [22:58]
Zing Singh
Then you'd be sat on a bench like Forrest Gump rather than talking to.
- [23:01]
Simon Jack
You guys, you know?
- [23:03]
Zing Singh
Yeah, I know. But you know, we're all the luckier for the fact that you didn't and you're still sat here talking to us.
- [23:07]
Simon Jack
Lucky you. That's right.
- [23:09]
Zing Singh
Okay, well, let's trace Evan's rise from a million to a billion. Because after becoming a millionaire and dropping out, Evan moved straight back into his dad's house in The Pacific Palisades. Now, Bobby Murphy actually moved in there with him too. Because Evan's dad's house became the first official headquarters of Snapchat. They even convinced a couple of friends to drop out of Stanford to be their first hires.
- [23:30]
Simon Jack
So now they had committed to Snapchat as a career. The small team worked very hard round the clock, sleeping where they worked. The usual tech startup story. The team grew. Soon there were seven or eight of them, all staying at Evan's dad's house. How big is this house?
- [23:43]
Zing Singh
I know. I mean. Unsurprisingly, though, things quickly reached breaking point at good old Pacific Palisades hq. Apparently one one night, Evan's dad's girlfriend, who would later become his wife, came home to find one of the team sleeping on the couch with a blanket that she'd bought as a Christmas gift. And she decided she'd had enough and she kicked the whole team out.
- [24:03]
Simon Jack
But rather than heading to Silicon Valley like many tech startups, they opted to set up shop in a blue beach house on the boardwalk in LA's Venice Beach. It sounds like a nice place to have your corporate headquarters.
- [24:14]
Zing Singh
Now, that beach house already had a bit of a reputation. It was a medical marijuana dispensary and then it was used as a location by the sports brand Nike to throw promo parties. So you can kind of already get a vibe of what this HQ is like. Now, the Snapchat team had a glowing life size replica of the Ghost Face Chiller logo erected right outside the entrance in the early days. Evan in particular loved this because people would come up to the house in those days and give them feedback on the app in real time.
- [24:40]
Simon Jack
Yeah, it wasn't all good feedback. One of the toughest bits they got from potential investors was that the central premise of Snapchat messages disappearing was an idea that the big tech companies could just copy and it'd be very difficult to compete with that. And late in 2012, one of the biggest platforms came sniffing around. Snapchat. Evan and Bobby were contacted by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. We're thinking about the context here. In 2012, Facebook was already enormous. Zuckerberg had been named the world's youngest billionaire four years earlier. He's a superstar billionaire, still only 28, six years older than Evan, four years older than Bobby and Evan.
- [25:16]
Zing Singh
And Bobby knew Zuckerberg was interested in Snapchat. So rather than take up his invite to visit Facebook HQ in Northern California, they insisted he come to Ghostface Chiller. Now, this is actually reminiscent of another one of our Billionaires, the TV impresario John Demole. So he was selling, if you remember, the rights to Big Brother. And he told all these US execs who were sniffing around that he wasn't going to go to America, thank you very much. They were going to have to come to him all the way in the Netherlands. Kind of a kind of muscle contest, isn't it?
- [25:47]
Simon Jack
Yeah, they may have been acting cocky. The real truth was is they were pretty nervous. Zuckerberg told them about his new Poke app, which Evan said ultimately ended up being a copycat of Snapchat. At at the time, publicly everyone was keeping things cool. But their fears they had of being copied by a big player seemed to actually becoming a reality.
- [26:07]
Zing Singh
Then when Facebook released Polk the week before Christmas, it shot up to the top of the app download charts. But Poke quickly slid down the app charts while Snapchat continued climbing. Evan actually has since called Polk's release the greatest Christmas gift he's ever had. Because the publicity that surrounded Polk's launch ended up boosting Snapchat, which was of course the OG disappearing message applied.
- [26:29]
Simon Jack
So Snapchat really building momentum in 2013 and this is their moment. Their old friend and ex Snapchat collaborator Reggie Brown reappears in the story. That February he sued the duo for a 20% share of the company. He said he came up with the initial idea for the app and the logo. He claimed that he was under the impression that Toyopa Group, the company Snapchat originally ran under, was registered in all three of their names. He didn't know that Evan and Bobby had just changed the name of their previous company, Future Freshmen, and totally cut him out.
- [26:57]
Zing Singh
Out Now. Evan and Bobby argued that ideas without execution were worthless. Which, you know, fair enough, we all come up with hair brained ideas and don't follow through on them. And funnily enough, they hired the legal team that represented the Winklevosses. Now if you remember them, they are the twins who sued Mark Zuckerberg and they claimed they had a hand in the creation of Facebook.
- [27:16]
Simon Jack
Yeah, there's a great scene in the film the Social Network where the Winklevoss is coming complaining they've stole my idea and the boss of Harvard gives them short. Have another idea, get on with it.
- [27:26]
Zing Singh
Exactly.
- [27:27]
Simon Jack
While the court proceedings rumbled on, Snapchat was Soaring. By June, 200 million images were being shared on the app every day. They had a funding round raising 60 million from various venture capitalists. This was on top of 13 and a half million raised a few months earlier. It meant that Snapchat's valuation had leapt up to $800 million.
- [27:48]
Zing Singh
So if you looked at it on paper, Evan and Bobby were getting seriously rich. But they also got to pocket some actual physical money when investors allowed them cash out 10 million each on top of the money that went into the company. And this is interesting, right, because on Good Bad Billionaire, we usually talk about how much someone is worth on paper.
- [28:06]
Simon Jack
Right.
- [28:06]
Zing Singh
But it doesn't necessarily mean they can just go to an ATM and draw out 500 million.
- [28:11]
Simon Jack
Yeah. I knew a guy who started something during the dot com boom back at the end of the 90s and on paper at one point was worth $20 million. But then the dot com bust happened and it was worthless. So taking some money out and putting it in cold hard cash is a pretty sensible thing to do while the going is good. Because you don't know in this fast moving world whether you're going to realize that money, whether you're ever going to get a cash in. And that gave them the confidence to make quite a big decision. When Facebook came back and offered to buy the whole company outright, Evan said there wasn't that feeling of, oh no, I'm not going to be able to buy a house, I'm not going to be able to have a family. We were like, we've got 10 million bucks each. Let's go for it.
- [28:48]
Zing Singh
Yeah. Reports vary, but the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook first offered to buy Snapchat for more than a billion dollars and then came back to discuss an all cash offer that would have valued Snapchat at 3 billion or more. Evanson said that 3 billion was not technically the number offered, but it's what's been reported publicly, so we can go with that. And, you know, that is a lot.
- [29:09]
Simon Jack
Well, you see, that's a very different number to the $1 million you were talking about earlier, saying, what would you do if you got a billion? If you're offered 3 billion, that's dynastic kind of money. That means you and three or four generations of your family will never, ever have to work again. Again.
- [29:21]
Zing Singh
Yeah. Unless of course, the second or third generation is very good at spending it.
- [29:24]
Simon Jack
Yeah. Evan since said there was never a day that he doubted spurning the Facebook offer. And he cites Instagram as an example. Now, this is a very good example because the company sold itself to Facebook for $1 billion two years after its founding. It's now probably the most profitable bit of Meta, which includes Facebook and WhatsApp. And I remember at the time there was was Peter Thiel, another of our billionaires, said that he sold shares in Facebook because he was worried that Facebook had paid a billion dollars for a company which had 12 employees and had never made a profit. That was a terrible mistake on Peter Thiel's part and just shows what an incredible deal Mark Zuckerberg got for buying a 12 person company for a billion dollars. Because if you think of Instagram now, it's one of the three main struts of Meta, which is now worth over a trillion dollars. I mean, quite a long. A lot over a trillion dollars. So just goes to show, that sounds like crazy money, but there's even crazier money out there.
- [30:24]
Zing Singh
Yeah, there's a trillion. I mean, we've not even talked about the potential of someone being a trillionaire on this show yet.
- [30:30]
Simon Jack
Yeah, he's not yet a billionaire, crucially, but in 2014, understatement of the year, life was pretty good. One reason being that he met his future wife, Australian former Victoria's Secret model Miranda Kerr.
- [30:41]
Zing Singh
Miranda and Evan's first date was at a Kundalini Yoga Club class in Los Angeles.
- [30:45]
Simon Jack
I'm not even going to ask what that is.
- [30:47]
Zing Singh
So la. They announced their engagement in 2016 when Miranda posted a Snapchat in which a cartoon avatar on Snapchat, these are called Bitmojis of Evan, was proposing to her. They married in 2017 at their $12 million ranch house, once owned by Harrison Ford, no less, and they now have three children together. Miranda also has an older son with her ex husband, the actor Orlando Bloom. Kerr herself is a skincare beauty founder. And Evan says she really understands that it's hard to be an entrepreneur. Simon, does this sound like a hard life to you?
- [31:16]
Simon Jack
So hard. This sounds so hard. I've got hundreds of millions of dollars. My wife's a Victoria's Secret model. It's really. Life is tough.
- [31:24]
Zing Singh
It sounds like he's living the frat boy dream.
- [31:26]
Simon Jack
Oh, totally. Anyway, no, it all sounds very shallow to me, but anyway. Back in 2014, Evan and Bobby were listed in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People. But it wasn't all sunshine and roses. There was controversy when some old sexist emails Evan sent to fraternity bro while at Stanford leak and were acquired by the gossip site Gorka.
- [31:47]
Zing Singh
In them, he encourages fellow Kappa Sigma members to get sorority women drunk enough to have sex, mocks another frat by suggesting its members are gay, and refers to a different group of sorority members as Sororis Sluts.
- [31:59]
Simon Jack
Oh, pretty unpleasant stuff. He probably wishes he'd had Snapchat to send those messages on. In response to the leak, Evan said he was obviously mortified and embarrassed that my idiotic emails during my fraternity days were made public. He also said he had no excuse. I'm sorry. I wrote them at the time and I was a jerk to have written them. They in no way reflect who I am today or my views towards women worth noting.
- [32:19]
Zing Singh
He was 23 at the time that the messages leaked. So when he wrote them, he was maybe, you know, two, three years younger than that.
- [32:25]
Simon Jack
Okay, so, you know, he's matured a lot in those two or three years.
- [32:28]
Zing Singh
Well, we would hope so. Still, one issue he was able to shake off was Reggie. Now, in September, the dispute over Reggie's claim of ownership was settled under mutually agreeable terms. The company agreed to pay Reggie a then confidential settlement settlement of $157.5 million. In a statement, Evan said, we're pleased that we have been able to resolve this matter in a MANNER Satisfactory to Mr. Brown and the company. We acknowledge Reggie's contribution to the creation of Snapchat and appreciate his work in getting the application off the ground.
- [32:59]
Simon Jack
That sounds like it was written through gritted teeth. Maybe it was sincere. But anyway, Evan had another win in 2014 as Facebook scrapped its sort of rival Poke app. And the year ended on another high as Snapchat announced it had raised $485 million from 20 investors, which meant the company had a valuation of at least $10 billion.
- [33:19]
Zing Singh
Now, with Evan's share of the company valued at well over a billion dollars, he'd made it. He was a billionaire. And in 2015, Forbes magazine confirmed this, putting him on their billionaire list for the first time. He was ranked 327 with $2.1 billion. Bobby, meanwhile, was ranked at 375 with 1.8 billion. And Forbes also named Evan the world's youngest billionaire there, following in, of course, Mark Zuckerberg's footsteps.
- [33:53]
Simon Jack
So let's take him beyond a billion. Let's look at how things have gone for Evan in the decades since he became a billionaire.
- [33:59]
Zing Singh
There have been some ups and downs. Now, in 2016, Snapchat was hit by another Facebook copycat, but this time it landed a huge blow. Instagram released their stories feature in August 2016. Now, if you've ever used Stories, you'll know it is uncommon. Similar to Snapchat Stories, which allow users to share content that can be viewed an unlimited number of times over a 24 hour period. First launching in 2013, I've never quite.
- [34:25]
Simon Jack
Understood Stories as opposed to regular posts. I mean, maybe it's a function of my age, but it seems to me, you know, you want to be people to be able to see. And so for example, they'll be, and I'm chatting with my family, they'll say, oh, did you see so and so's story? Oh, it's too late and I want to see it and it's too late, it's gone.
- [34:42]
Zing Singh
I think the best way I can rationalize the difference between putting things on Stories and on Grit Grid is that grid is your public facing Persona. It's what you want, you know, your teachers, your professors, your managers at work to see. Yeah. And Stories, because they disappear within 24 hours, are for the people who are truly engaged with your life. Like your friends, your family.
- [35:03]
Simon Jack
They're checking in regularly.
- [35:04]
Zing Singh
They're checking in regularly and you know, so you can post stuff that you might not want your boss to take a look at. Like the fact, you know, it's a risk though, festival. I mean, it is a risk because your boss could also be very online.
- [35:15]
Simon Jack
Yeah.
- [35:16]
Zing Singh
In a way, Instagram Stories managed to combine both what Instagram was already doing with what Snapchat did very well.
- [35:22]
Simon Jack
So they're basically parking their tanks on Snapchat's lawn here, basically with this new feature.
- [35:26]
Zing Singh
Exactly.
- [35:27]
Simon Jack
And one of Instagram's co founders in fact would later admit Instagram Stories was a copy of Snapchat's original feature, though he would also eventually argue they were able to differentiate it from Snapchat over time. And Instagram Stories would go on to eclipse Snapchat Stories popularity, fulfilling a threat which they always thought might happen one of these days.
- [35:47]
Zing Singh
Yeah, it's interesting because I remember when, when Instagram Stories launched, people said nobody would use it. It's such a blatant copy. It was seen as meta being quite desperate at the time. But you know, in two years, Instagram Stories was twice as popular with more than 400 million people using it each day. Evan has been surprisingly gracious over this copycat behavior. He said, one of the things I really admire is when they copied the Stories feature, they stopped pretending they were doing anything different with things like Poke. They sort of tried to pass it off as their own creation. In other words, Instagram was just really blatant about it.
- [36:19]
Simon Jack
Yeah, well, at 26 years old, Evan could afford to be a bit magnanimous. He was running a company with more than 1,000 employees, offices on three continents. He was reaching more than 150 million daily users. That was then nearly 15 million more than Twitter, another social media platform. It also that year saw Snapchat pave the way for an ipo. Those three little letters, which often mean fabulous riches when they sell shares to the public, had a rebrand and expansion to focus on hardware. Where Evan says, and this is interesting, they wanted to make really clear that they weren't a single product company. Did they succeed with that? Let us see.
- [36:56]
Zing Singh
Well, the company released a physical product, a pair of augmented reality glasses called Spectacles. Now these had amazing.
- [37:03]
Simon Jack
What a brilliant word. Hours in the focus groups to come up with Spectacles.
- [37:06]
Zing Singh
I know, yeah, tell me about it. Now, Spectacles ended up having a limited distribution. They were selling for 129.99. They ended up being a big letdown. And that resulted in the company writing off million in unsold hardware. Spectacles did not take off.
- [37:23]
Simon Jack
Yeah. More successful perhaps was the company's rebrand. They changed their name to Snap Inc. And this was five years before Facebook became Meta. Also a year after Google became Alphabet. So something a lot of these big tech companies were doing. So people would stop associating them with a single product. Particularly important, I think in the case of like Google, for example.
- [37:43]
Zing Singh
Also successful was Snap Inc's IPO where they sold shares to the public. In 2017. User growth had actually slowed down in the face of intense competition from Facebook. Spectacles had flopped, but stocks soared 44% on the first day of trading, valuing the company at $28 billion. Now at the time, this was the largest IPO since Chinese E commerce company Alibaba's initial public offering in 2014.
- [38:09]
Simon Jack
Poppy and Evan made $272 million by selling 16 million of their shares and more than a billion in paper gains. What their shares are worth the ones they haven't sold. And although the pair owned just 3.6 billion of the now $28 billion company, they still controlled more than 88% of voting power in the company. Now this is really interesting. So this means that even though you've got a minority shareholding, because you have different classes of shares with the founders shares having more voting rights, even though you're a minority shareholder, you still have have control. And this is a big feature of these tech companies. Zuckerberg, for example, had that as well. He managed to contain, still has effective control of the company. And that idea of having this dual class of shares is something that other stock markets allow to a greater or lesser extent, but it's been pioneered by places like the NASDAQ Stock Exchange. Which has been very popular for founders who want to raise money money, want to cash in some of their chips, but want to keep control.
- [39:11]
Zing Singh
But we have to say that since the ipo, things haven't really moved forward for Snapchat because, you know, it's been hard to shake this idea that Snap Inc. Is just a one product company. In 2018, the Times newspaper actually asked if Evan Spiegel is, in their words, the new Steve Jobs or just a frat boy with a good idea. Ouch.
- [39:30]
Simon Jack
Yeah. While Bloomberg estimated Evan Spiegel's fortune to be as high as 14 billion in 2021, they soon had him back under 3 billion billion. And the last few years have seen the company challenged by some economic downturns, shifts in the digital ad market, and of course, the rise of other social media platforms like TikTok. In 2024, Snap laid off 10% of its workforce. At the time, a spokesperson said they were reorganizing to reduce hierarchy and promote in person collaboration. Very important that in person collaboration. Says the people who invented the social media app to keep people in arms length and staring at their phones.
- [40:07]
Zing Singh
Yeah, well, you know, irony is in very high supply in Silicon Valley these days, I think. But Snap are still setting their sights on taking on their big tech rivals and leading this field of AR hardware. That's augmented reality. With the relaunch of its consumer glasses in 2026, the latest version of Snap's specs, renamed from spectacles, brilliant, is 11 years and more than $3 billion in the making. So no pressure, guys.
- [40:31]
Simon Jack
Yeah, we'll see if they manage that. But one thing Evan has achieved since the company went public, the ipo, was finishing his degree. He went back to Stanford because he didn't want his kids to use having a billionaire dropout dad as an excuse not to go to college themselves.
- [40:46]
Zing Singh
So that's where he is now. And it is time to judge Evan Spiegel.
- [40:56]
Simon Jack
So what we do now is we look at our billionaire through a number of categories. Wealth, philanthropy, controversy, and things like power and legacy. We give them a score out of from 0 to 10 and then throw it over to you to decide whether you think they're good, bad, or just another billionaire. So let us start Sing with wealth.
- [41:16]
Zing Singh
So currently Forbes estimates his wealth in 2025 to be $2.9 billion. Not bad. However, Snap's shares have lost almost half their value over the last year because of competition from Meta TikTok stock. You know, since the IPO, and this is interesting, the company has never reported an Annual profit.
- [41:35]
Simon Jack
Wow, I did not know that. Well, that's quite something. So on wealth terms, $2.9 billion. You know, like you say, he's stupendously rich, but in our rarefied leagues, it's bottom of the table. Near the bottom.
- [41:47]
Zing Singh
Yeah. And don't forget, he had kind of a charmed rise to the top, really. You know, he came from a privileged family. Their first HQ was in his dad's house, which is, you know, big enough to clearly accommodate an HQ in the first place.
- [41:58]
Simon Jack
Yeah.
- [41:59]
Zing Singh
So I would actually score him quite low on wealth.
- [42:02]
Simon Jack
Yeah. Because part of it, as you rightly say, is how far have they come in the wealth stakes? A $75,000 BMW, which you insist on for all your hard work at school. This is not that rags to riches story. So. I agree. I'm going to give him a two for wealth.
- [42:17]
Zing Singh
Yeah, I think I would give him a 2 out of 10 for wealth.
- [42:19]
Simon Jack
Okay. Okay, Next category. Philanthropy. How much is he given back?
- [42:25]
Zing Singh
Well, in 2022, he paid off the college debt of almost 300 graduates in LA Art and Design school, where he'd actually taken classes himself. He's paid this off via the Spiegel family Fund. I think after the ipo, they also, Evan and Bobby also launched the Snap foundation, which is a non profit philanthropic organization. They've pledged to donate 13 million of their shares over their lifetimes.
- [42:47]
Simon Jack
As of 2021, Bobby had donated 287,000 shares to the charity. Evan's given 1.6 million, though it's unclear how many of those shares went to the Snap Foundation. And neither Bobby nor Evan currently sits on the board of that. So it's all a bit, you know, we don't know a great deal about that.
- [43:03]
Zing Singh
Yeah. And I think because we don't know a great deal about it, we're going to have to. Well, I'm going to score. I'm quite lowly.
- [43:08]
Simon Jack
Yeah.
- [43:09]
Zing Singh
I would say three out of ten.
- [43:10]
Simon Jack
Same here. Three for me. Controversy.
- [43:13]
Zing Singh
So Evan and Snapchat, alongside execs From Meta X, TikTok and Discord, were actually brought in to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the states about safeguarding children on their respective platforms because Snap Inc. Was named in mental health lawsuits currently ongoing, which have been brought forward by states, by school districts, by individuals saying that platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube are addictive and harmful to youth.
- [43:40]
Simon Jack
This is something, an accusation that has been leveled at the entire industry, as we've just pointed out there. I do think Snap or Snapchat stands out, particularly against the other ones. It's an issue which is vexing lawmakers and welfare, you know, custodians around the world, and something that regulators and parents have struggled to get a. Get a handle on.
- [44:02]
Zing Singh
Yeah, and I do have to kind of give him this because in his testimony, Evan did pledge to support something called the Kids Online Safety act and the Cooper Davis Act. Unlike some of the other tech executives.
- [44:13]
Simon Jack
He also had some run ins with Donald Trump. Snapchat banned him from its platform in January 2020. You'll remember that Twitter and Facebook did the same.
- [44:23]
Zing Singh
In the midst of the 2024 US presidential campaign, Snapchat actually remained one of the few platforms to maintain that ban of Donald Trump.
- [44:32]
Simon Jack
I think the controversy with Evan Spiegel is much more about his sort of frat boy ways, because some of those things were pretty unpleasant admittedly said when he was young. I don't think he sticks. He don't think he stands out in this regard from the rest of the industry. So on Contro, see, I'm just going to give him a pretty low number, actually. I'm going to give him a 3.
- [44:52]
Zing Singh
Yeah, I think I would also give him a 3 out of 10 because, yeah, as you say, personal controversy. I mean, the only thing that really stands out is what happened with Reggie, which they later settled. And also the leaked messages, which, apologies if any frat boys are listening to this, but those messages do not strike me as particularly an outlier among frat boy culture of the time.
- [45:15]
Simon Jack
Fair enough. Okay, three on that one. And then power and legacy. You know, this is. Have they changed the world? What will they be remembered for? One of my kids who's in their early 20s now says they're too old for Snapchat and described it as a dying app. And it has kind of been overtaken by other platforms with similar features.
- [45:34]
Zing Singh
I will say, however, that the idea of disappearing messages was clearly an incredibly good one because everything from WhatsApp to Instagram messages now has a disappearing message function.
- [45:45]
Simon Jack
Yeah, so they were onto something.
- [45:47]
Zing Singh
That kernel of an idea is now one of the, I would say, founding features of Internet apps. You get it everywhere.
- [45:56]
Simon Jack
It's also interesting, isn't it, because there was this thing about any stupid thing you do stays with you for life. There was this kind of challenge about who can try and put some privacy back in the bottle, you know, who can actually, you know, put the genie of privacy to some extent back under your control. I mean, you can sell privacy back to people. They will buy it after a subscription fee for a subscript. Okay, power and legacy to that times. Question, is Evan Spiegel the new Steve Jobs or just a frat boy with a good idea? Not saying he's just a frat boy with a good idea. He's definitely more that than Steve Jobs though.
- [46:28]
Zing Singh
Yeah, I would say I'd give him a 4 out of 10. But having said that, he is still very young. He's still got some gas in the tank left.
- [46:34]
Simon Jack
Who knows? Yeah, he's got lots of money. He might come up with some new product, maybe specs. The new iteration of Spectacles will prove to be a smash hit.
- [46:42]
Zing Singh
Oh, my God. Who knows? This space 2026.
- [46:45]
Simon Jack
We're waiting for the idea of the disappearing message. I agree, there was the germ of a good idea there. So I'll give him three for that, but that's it.
- [46:52]
Zing Singh
So three from you, four from me.
- [46:54]
Simon Jack
Okay.
- [46:55]
Zing Singh
And it's funny, isn't it, as we come to the end of the episode that the boy who was not allowed to watch TV by his parents became responsible for so many children's screen time.
- [47:05]
Simon Jack
So that leaves us just to ask you the question, is Evan Spiegel good, bad or just another billionaire? That is up to you. So we'd like you to email, if you would. Good, bad, billionaire. That's all one word. Bc.com or drop us a text or a WhatsApp to 001-917-686-1176. Tell us what you think and don't.
- [47:29]
Zing Singh
Forget to include your name and location as we may read out your message on a future episode. So who do we have on our next episode?
- [47:37]
Simon Jack
A man nicknamed the Big Wolf. He is a giant in the Norwegian, well, the world shipping industry. Shipping stuff all around the world. Getting himself in hot water geopolitically.
- [47:49]
Zing Singh
Yes. He's got a habit of making very high risk deals that most of us would balk at, including sailing into war zones and other controversial regions. That's Jon Fredrickson on the next episode of Good Bad Billionaire.
- [48:00]
Simon Jack
Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast produced by Mark Ward. The researcher is Maria Noyen. The editor is Paul Smith. And it's a BBC Studios audio production.
- [48:11]
Zing Singh
For the BBC World Service. The Commissioning editor is John Manelle.