The rise of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, once one of the youngest billionaires in the world

He is the oldest of three children and his parents are lawyers educated at Harvard and Stanford, according to a report from LA Weekly

The Santa Monica private school's notable alumni include celebrities like Jonah Hill, Jack Black, and Gwyneth Paltrow. 

"I was a pretty nerdy kid and shy through most of school," Spiegel said in an interview with the Palisadian-Post. "I was best friends with my computer teacher and built my own PC by the time I was in sixth grade."

They often went on trips to Europe, employed a full-time housekeeper, and even went snowboarding by helicopter in Canada. 

Less than a year later, his parents announced they were getting divorced, and Spiegel went to live with his father full-time during his senior year of high school, the LA Weekly reported. 

According to LA Weekly, Spiegel's father forced him to instate a budget, and Spiegel asked for his discipline to be rewarded with a $75,000 BMW 550i. After his dad refused, Spiegel moved back in with his mom, who leased him the BMW.

"Cars bring me sheer joy," Spiegel wrote in a letter to his parents in 2008 asking them to lease him the car. "I would really appreciate you validating me and all of my hard work by leasing the BMW."

A friend of the family let him sit in on a graduate-level class on entrepreneurship and venture capital, where he heard talks from tech luminaries like Google CEO Eric Schmidt and YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley, according to LA Weekly. 

Spiegel begged him for a job, and Cook ended up letting him work on a product that Intuit planned to release in India. This experience reportedly inspired Spiegel to launch his own project, and Cook later became an early Snapchat investor.

"We weren't cool," Murphy later told Forbes, "So we tried to build things to be cool."

In leaked emails to his fraternity, Spiegel made offensive, expletive-laden jokes about having sex with women. He was forced to apologize in 2014 when those emails went public, saying the messages "no way reflect who I am today."

The idea for Snapchat came later in spring 2011, reportedly spurred on by a conversation among fraternity brothers about sexting — that is, sending explicit messages and photos.

In a lawsuit years later, Brown alleged he was the first to propose an app for sending disappearing photos, and that Murphy was brought in afterwards to write code.

While Spiegel focused on design, Murphy did the coding and Brown led marketing.

"He's a silly dude,"Spiegel told Business Insider in 2013.

Later that year, the app's name was changed to Snapchat.

Brown later sued Spiegel and Murphy in 2013, claiming he wasn't given his equity: one-third of the company. The lawsuit was eventually settled, and Snapchat paid Brown $157.5 million to disappear.

Although he didn't earn it, he nonetheless walked across the stage to collect a diploma with his friends in June.

His younger sister, Caroline, is the CEO of Quinn, a platform for free audio- and text-based porn. She's described her platform as "a much less gross, more fun PornHub."

At its peak, Snapchat occupied thousands of square feet of office space in Venice, including an office steps from the beach on Market Street that once served as its headquarters. In 2019, Snap moved to Santa Monica.

It wasn't long before would-be acquirers came knocking on Spiegel's door to buy Snapchat. He famously rebuffed a $3 billion offer from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2013 — and then turned down a subsequent $4 billion offer from Google. Zuckerberg also reportedly di cussed the possibility of an acquisition of Snapchat again in 2016. 

He bought his own three-bedroom house for $3.3 million in Los Angeles' wealthy Brentwood neighborhood — less than four miles from his dad's place.

He was reportedly interested in buying Big Machine — the record label that represents Taylor Swift — but the deal never went through. The former CEO of Sony Entertainment, Michael Lynton, is the chairman of Snap's board.

After Snapchat completed a big funding round in 2013 Spiegel bought himself a Ferrari. Spiegel is also a licensed helicopter pilot.

Spiegel dons several looks in the shoot from a fur coat (with a puppy in hand) to a plaid suit. 

He has also said he uses Kora Organics Daily Hand Cream, telling GQ, "In 2nd grade, a teacher made our class hold hands. A girl made fun of me for how dry my hands were, and I haven't forgotten."

Snap rarely holds all-hands meetings, and employees often don't know about products the company is working on until they're announced publicly.

Spiegel has often flanked by a heavy security team, and he traveled on his own private jet separate from bankers during Snap's IPO roadshow. He reportedly once requested an armed security detail (but didn't get it), and $890,399 of Snapchat's money was spent on security for Spiegel in 2016.

During board meetings, Spiegel reportedly spends much of his time using Snapchat and playing with his phone. "I remember growing up I was taught to be small, be a turtle," Spiegel told Bloomberg in 2018.

"When you go to work at Snapchat you go to work for Evan," one source told Recode. "You don't go to teach Evan. You don't go to show him the ropes."

In 2013, he was romantically tied to a model who was later a contestant on "The Bachelor."

The night they met, Harper's Bazaar editor-in-chief Glenda Bailey said to Kerr, "I bet you two are going to get married."

The 7,164-square-foot home was once owned by Harrison Ford, and has a gym, pool and guest house.

Spiegel proposed to Kerr with a ring that is worth an estimated $55,000.

After some of Snapchat's core features were replicated on Instagram and Facebook's other apps in 2016, Kerr said she was "appalled" by Facebook's strategy. "Can they not be innovative?" she said in an interview. "Do they have to steal all of my partner's ideas?"

"At the end of the day, just because Yahoo has a search box, it doesn't mean they're Google," Spiegel said in mid-2017. "You have to get comfortable with and enjoy the fact that someone is going to copy you if you make great stuff."

Snap also expanded its offerings beyond the Snapchat app, and unveiled smart sunglasses with a built-in camera called Spectacles.

In an S-1 filing Snap, and cofounders, pledged to donate up to 13,000,000 shares of Class A common stock over a period of 15 to 20 years to the Snap Foundation. 

Spiegel added about $1.6 billion to his net worth based on Snap's 44% jump in share price in the first day of trading, according to Bloomberg. 

The wedding was an "intimate affair" with less than 50 guests in attendance, and included pre-nuptial yoga and after-hours karaoke.

Spiegel and Kerr honeymooned on the private island of Laucala in Fiji, at a resort owned by Red Bull billionaire Dietrich Mateschitz.

Their son was born at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and was named Hart after Spiegel's grandfather. 

"He acts like he's 50. He's not out partying," Kerr once said. "He goes to work in Venice. He comes home. We don't go out. We'd rather be at home and have dinner, go to bed early."

Flynn is allowed only 1.5 hours of screen time per week, a rule Spiegel said is inspired by his own parents not allowing him to watch TV until he was nearly a teenager.

"He's already on his iPod," Spiegel said in a 2018 interview. "We email. Very emoji heavy. It's good!"

Spiegel was granted citizenship through a rare process for French-speaking foreign nationals who have taken "exceptional action" for France. "Honestly, he loves France," a Snap spokesperson said.

The redesign lead user count to drop, its stock to fall, and employee layoffs to follow. Kylie Jenner even publicly criticized the app.

However, Spiegel later said he doesn't regret the disastrous redesign, and said it actually helped to drive more users to watch "premium content" on Snapchat.

Spiegel, however, still had advice for founders: "Don't go public."

"We are overjoyed at the arrival of Myles and so appreciate everyone's kind words and wishes during this special time," Kerr wrote on Instagram, alongside a photo of her son's embroidered name. "We couldn't be more excited to welcome our beautiful son into our family."

While CEOs like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg have labelled the app as a competitor, Spiegel said he considered TikTok as a "friend" helping people to spend even more time on their smartphones.

"Snapchat is about communicating with close friends and seems like TikTok is a popularity contest," Spiegel said. 

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in November 2019, Spiegel discussed the struggles of implementing the controversial redesign. 

"As a public company, people are looking for more predictable growth. Making drastic changes can actually harm the business in a way that makes it harder going forward. We've found ways to introduce products in a smoother way, which should hopefully help us move faster," he said. 

"No TV until I was a teen. When I applied to college, I wrote my essay about how when my friends talked about "South Park," I thought it was a park. My friends eventually explained," Spiegel told the Wall Street Journal. 

The 10,000 square foot house, located near the Seine river in Paris, includes six bedrooms, five bathrooms, a swimming pool, courtyard, garden, library, music room, wine cellar, private dressing rooms, and space for nurses, maids, or chefs. 

 The company announced that it had accrued close to 300 million daily active users over the second quarter of 2021, representing an increase in 55 million users from the year prior. 

"Our second quarter results reflect the broad-based strength of our business, as we grew both revenue and daily active users at the highest rates we have achieved in the past four years," Spiegel said at the time. 

At an internal meeting in July 2020, Spiegel said that the company keeps its diversity reports private because releasing data would reinforce the idea that minority groups are underrepresented in the tech industry. He also told employees that the company's numbers were in line with those at other tech companies which tended to skew white and male. 

Later that month, though, the company released its first diversity report. The report broke down employee demographics going back all the way back to when Snap was first founded in 2011. It showed that Black and Latinx employees comprised less than 11% of the company's staff and less than a third of the company's staff identified as women. 

The investigation came after some former employees spoke out in June about diminishing diversity and biased editorial practices. The company also hired lawyers from Seattle-based firm William Kastner to conduct interviews as part of a "confidential investigation" sources previously told Insider. 

The Spiegels purchased a vacant lot spanning 1.4 acres for $25 million in 2021. By August 2022, they closed on a second parcel of land with an unfurnished mansion for $120 million, according to the New York Post. 

Spiegel also diverted blame for the company's massive hiring spree over the previous 18 months in which headcount grew by thousands of people.

Spiegel's losses came as Snap itself struggled with year-over-year losses, struggles with its advertising business, and Snapchat contended with stagnating user growth. 

"The metaverse is 'living inside of a computer.' The last thing I want to do when I get home from work during a long day is live inside of a computer," Spiegel previously said.

"We'd love that. In the short term," he told a reporter in April. "In the short term, that is something that would help us out."

At the same time he acknowledged the ban could set a problematic precedent for other technology platforms.

"I think there are some big questions about what that would mean longer term, single out a single technology company, instead of developing a more comprehensive regulatory well," he said.

Alex Heath, Madeline Stone, Paige Leskin, and Avery Hartmans contributed to earlier versions of this article.