Snapchat still ranks among the world’s most recognised social media brands and boasts almost 400 million daily active users, Spiegel said in the company’s 2023 second quarter earnings release. However, during the last year, the company underwent sweeping lay-offs, shut down projects and saw a shake-up in its executive ranks, as it struggled with profitability and steady revenue growth.

Here’s how Evan Spiegel got his start and became a billionaire by the time he was 25 – and how Snap Inc. struggled to stay on top:

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Evan Spiegel had a privileged upbringing

Born in 1990, Spiegel grew up in a US$2 million house in the Pacific Palisades, a ritzy Los Angeles enclave just east of Malibu. He is the oldest of three children and his parents are lawyers educated at Harvard and Stanford, according to a report from LA Weekly.

Young Spiegel spent his early years at an ultra-exclusive school called Crossroads, which costs tens of thousands per academic year. The Santa Monica private school’s notable alumni include celebrities like Jonah Hill, Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow.

When Spiegel turned 16 and got his driving licence, his parents gave him a new Cadillac Escalade. 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.

Around this time, Spiegel landed a marketing internship with Red Bull, during which he reportedly racked up expenses and held several parties at his father’s home.

Spiegel went on to study product design at Stanford University, his father’s alma mater. 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 co-founder Chad Hurley.

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Spiegel befriended Intuit co-founder Scott Cook after he gave a talk at one of those classes and begged him for a job. 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.

At Stanford, Spiegel met future Snapchat co-founders Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy, who were all part of the fraternity Kappa Sigma at some point.

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

Snapchat’s early days

Early on, Spiegel and Murphy worked together on failed start-up ideas, including one to help high schoolers apply for university. 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.

However, the early founding story of Snapchat is murky and disputed. 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.

In the summer of 2011, the three university students stayed at Spiegel’s dad’s house in the Palisades to work on their project: an app for sending pictures that would expire and disappear after a set amount of time. While Spiegel focused on design, Murphy did the coding and Brown led marketing.

The app first launched in July 2011 under the name Picaboo and was spread by simple word of mouth and invites to the founders’ friends. Later that year, the app’s name was changed to Snapchat. Not long after the launch, the relationship between the three founders began to fray and Brown was forced out of the company.

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 US$157.5 million to disappear.

In 2012, Spiegel dropped out of Stanford and moved his young company into an office on the Venice boardwalk. At its peak, Snap Inc. 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, the company moved to Santa Monica.

By mid-2013, Snapchat had nearly 60 million downloads and was valued at US$800 million.

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Living the life of luxury

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

Interestingly, he cares about fashion more than most tech CEOs and he made headlines in October 2015 for appearing on the cover of Vogue Italy. Spiegel dons several looks in the shoot, from a fur coat to a plaid suit.

Snap Inc. rarely holds all-hands meetings and employees often don’t know about products the company is working on until they’re announced publicly. Its employees told Recode in 2016 that Spiegel is involved in all business decisions and that his opinions are final – up to point he’s killed “all-but-finalised” deals at the last minute.

As Snapchat’s user base and valuation continued to swell, Spiegel quickly became a bona fide celebrity in the worlds of tech and media. He regularly rubs shoulders with A-listers and celebrities. In 2013, he was romantically tied to a model who was later a contestant on The Bachelor.

The 7,160 sq ft home was once owned by Harrison Ford and has a gym, pool and guest house. A few months later, in July 2016, the couple announced they were engaged. Kerr showed off her estimated US$55,000 ring – on Snapchat, no less.

Snap Inc. and Snap Foundation

In September 2016, Spiegel renamed his company to Snap Inc., which he called it a “camera company” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. It also expanded its offerings beyond the Snapchat app and unveiled smart sunglasses with a built-in camera called Spectacles.

In February 2017, Spiegel and co-founder Murphy established the Snap Foundation to support non-profit arts, education and youth programmes.

In an S-1 filing, Snap Inc. and co-founders pledged to donate up to 13 million shares of class A ordinary share over a period of 15 to 20 years to the Snap Foundation. Snap went public on March 2, 2017 at a valuation of roughly US$33 billion.

Spiegel even added about US$1.6 billion to his net worth based on Snap’s 44 per cent jump in share price in the first day of trading.

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His marriage to supermodel Miranda Kerr

Not long after, Kerr and Spiegel tied the knot in a backyard ceremony at their home in Brentwood in May 2017. The wedding was an “intimate affair” with less than 50 guests in attendance and included prenuptial yoga and after-hours karaoke.

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

In March 2019, Kerr and Spiegel said they were expecting their second child together. Kerr announced on Instagram in October that she had given birth to a baby boy named Myles.

Snap’s challenges

The year of 2018 also presented Spiegel with some new challenges. Snap rolled out a redesign to its app in February that was massively unpopular with users. The redesign led user count to drop, its stock to fall and employee lay-offs to follow. Kylie Jenner even publicly criticised 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.

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Although 2018 proved difficult for Spiegel, Snapchat rebounded in 2019 to recover its disastrous losses. Spiegel, however, still had advice for founders: “Don’t go public.”

The year 2019 was also a massive one for another social platform: TikTok, the viral video-sharing app. While CEOs like Facebook’s 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.

But 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.”

In January 2021, Spiegel and Kerr bought a US$30 million mansion in Paris. The 10,000 sq ft 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 and chefs.

The year 2021 was a banner year for the company as it marked Snap’s highest growth in users since going public in 2017. 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.

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At the same time, Spiegel was forced to reckon with charges against the lack of diversity in Snap’s workforce. In 2020, the company released its first diversity report. The report broke down employee demographics, going all the way back to when Snap was first founded in 2011. It showed that Black and Latin-American employees comprised less than 11 per cent of the company’s staff and less than a third of the company’s staff were women.

Snap also launched an investigation into allegations of racism and sexism at the company. 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”.

Later that year, Spiegel and Kerr bought property in the ritzy Los Angeles neighbourhood of Holmby Hills where other tech execs like Sean Parker own homes.

The Spiegels bought a vacant lot spanning 0.5 hectares for US$25 million in 2021. By August 2022, they closed on a second parcel of land with an unfurnished mansion for US$120 million.

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After laying off about 20 per cent of the company’s staff in late August 2022, Spiegel told remaining employees at an all hands meeting to “prove the haters wrong”.

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

Between October 2021 and October 2022, Spiegel’s net worth plunged from US$13.9 billion to US$2.3 billion, according to estimates by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

“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.