Evan Spiegel was 26 when Snap Inc. went public in March 2017, making him the youngest CEO of a publicly traded company. The initial public offering came six years after Spiegel co-founded the company with Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown, his fraternity brothers at Stanford University, and as 150 million people were using Snapchat, the company's marque product, to send and receive disappearing messages every day.
Spiegel and Murphy each own 18 percent of Snap and their voting shares give them control of the company's board, but Snap's run as a publicly traded company has been anything but charmed. The company's shares have spent most of that time below the IPO price of $17 a share and Snap — which spent $2.24 billion on stock-based compensation while recording just $331.3 million in revenue for last year — has been accused of enriching insiders at the expense of investors. Analysts are also worried that the company is failing to keep pace with Facebook's Instagram.
Snap's stumbles have led to speculation that Spiegel may regret turning down a Facebook offer to buy Snapchat for $3 billion in 2013.
For now, though, Spiegel is married to supermodel Miranda Kerr and has an estimated net worth of $3.1 billion, enough to put him in the top 10 of Forbes List of Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40. Spiegel, now 27, knows he is lucky. "I am a young, white, educated male," he reportedly said at a Stanford business conference. "I got really, really lucky. And life isn't fair."