Evan Spiegel

Evan Spiegel
Born	Evan Thomas Spiegel 4 6, 1990
Birthplace	Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Nationality	American, French
Occupation	Entrepreneur, business executive
Title	CEO of Snap Inc.
Employer	Snap Inc.
Known for	Co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc.
Education	Stanford University (BS)
Children	3

Evan Thomas Spiegel (born June 4, 1990) is an American and French businessman who co-founded Snap Inc., the parent company of the multimedia messaging application Snapchat. As CEO of Snap Inc., Spiegel has led the company from a Stanford University dorm-room project into a publicly traded technology firm with hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Spiegel co-created Snapchat in 2011 alongside Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown while the three were students at Stanford, and the application's emphasis on ephemeral messaging — photos and videos that disappear after being viewed — introduced a paradigm shift in social media communication. He became the youngest billionaire in the world in 2015, and has continued to serve as the company's chief executive through its initial public offering in 2017 and its subsequent evolution into a camera and augmented reality company. In recent years, Spiegel has been a public voice on technology policy issues, including youth safety on social media platforms and the implications of artificial intelligence, speaking at forums such as the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Australian model Miranda Kerr, with whom he has three children.

Early Life

Evan Thomas Spiegel was born on June 4, 1990, in Los Angeles, California. He grew up in an affluent environment in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. His parents, John Spiegel and Melissa Ann Thomas, are both attorneys who graduated from Yale Law School and practiced at major law firms in Los Angeles. His father was a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson, while his mother practiced tax law at a prominent firm before becoming a stay-at-home parent.

Spiegel attended the Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, a private school in Santa Monica, California. During his formative years, he developed an interest in design and technology. He gained early exposure to the technology industry through an unpaid internship at a biomedical company, Red Bull, and through his work on various design projects during high school.

Spiegel's upbringing in Los Angeles would later influence the development of Snapchat. The city's culture of visual communication and creative expression informed his approach to building a camera-first communication platform. His early interest in art and design, cultivated at Crossroads, would become central to the product philosophy he brought to Snap Inc.

Education

Spiegel enrolled at Stanford University, where he studied product design. It was at Stanford that he met Bobby Murphy, who would become his co-founder at Snapchat. The two connected through their membership in the Kappa Sigma fraternity. During his time at Stanford, Spiegel took courses that combined design thinking with technology, an approach that influenced his later product development philosophy.

In 2011, while still a student, Spiegel worked with Murphy and fellow Stanford student Reggie Brown on a class project that would become the foundation of Snapchat. Brown initially brought the idea of disappearing photo messages to Spiegel, and the three began developing the concept together. The app was initially called "Picaboo" before being renamed Snapchat.

Spiegel ultimately left Stanford in 2012, just a few credits short of completing his degree, to focus on building Snapchat full-time. He later returned to complete his coursework and received his Bachelor of Science degree from Stanford University.

During his time in the Kappa Sigma fraternity at Stanford, Spiegel sent emails that later became the subject of public scrutiny. In 2014, leaked emails from his fraternity years surfaced publicly, containing language that was characterized as sexist and derogatory. Spiegel responded by stating he was "mortified and embarrassed" by the contents of the emails, which he said did not reflect his values.

Career

Founding of Snapchat

In the spring of 2011, Reggie Brown approached Spiegel with an idea for a mobile application that would allow users to send photos that would disappear after a set period of time. Spiegel and Bobby Murphy began working with Brown to develop the concept. The app, initially launched as "Picaboo" in July 2011, allowed users to send photos that would self-destruct after being viewed. The concept was rooted in a belief that digital communication should more closely mirror the transience of face-to-face conversation, where words and expressions are not permanently recorded.

The app was relaunched as "Snapchat" in September 2011, and it began to gain traction among users, particularly among high school and college students. The application's emphasis on impermanence stood in sharp contrast to the dominant social media platforms of the time, such as Facebook and Instagram, where content was designed to be permanent and accumulative. Snapchat's disappearing messages addressed growing concerns about digital permanence and the pressure to curate a polished online persona.

The early growth of Snapchat led to a dispute with Reggie Brown over his role in the company's founding. Brown filed a lawsuit against Spiegel and Murphy, claiming he had been unfairly excluded from the company. The lawsuit was settled in September 2014, with Snap Inc. acknowledging Brown's contributions to the original Snapchat concept.

Growth and Early Investment

Under Spiegel's leadership as CEO, Snapchat experienced rapid growth. The application attracted its first major venture capital investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2012. By 2013, Snapchat was processing hundreds of millions of snaps per day, and the company turned down a reported $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook — a decision that was attributed to Spiegel's conviction that the company could build a more valuable independent enterprise.

Spiegel's product decisions during this period reflected his design-oriented approach to technology. He introduced Snapchat Stories in October 2013, a feature that allowed users to compile snaps into a narrative that lasted for 24 hours. This feature proved enormously influential and was later adopted by Instagram, Facebook, and numerous other platforms. Spiegel also oversaw the introduction of creative tools such as Lenses (augmented reality filters applied to users' faces) and Geofilters (location-based overlays), which expanded Snapchat's functionality beyond simple messaging into creative expression and augmented reality.

The company attracted successive rounds of funding at increasing valuations, with investments from firms including Benchmark, Institutional Venture Partners, and Tencent. By 2015, Spiegel became the youngest billionaire in the world, reflecting the rapid rise in Snapchat's valuation.

Rebranding to Snap Inc. and IPO

In September 2016, Spiegel rebranded the company from Snapchat, Inc. to Snap Inc., positioning it as a "camera company" rather than a social media company. The rebranding coincided with the launch of Spectacles, the company's first hardware product — sunglasses equipped with a camera that could record short video clips and upload them directly to Snapchat. The Spectacles launch represented Spiegel's ambition to expand beyond software into the intersection of hardware, augmented reality, and communication.

On March 2, 2017, Snap Inc. went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol SNAP. The initial public offering priced shares at $17, valuing the company at approximately $24 billion. It was one of the largest technology IPOs since Facebook's debut in 2012. Spiegel and Murphy retained significant voting control through a dual-class share structure that gave their shares substantially more voting power than those sold to public investors — a structure that drew both praise for allowing long-term thinking and criticism for limiting shareholder influence.

Challenges and Competition

Following the IPO, Snap Inc. faced a series of challenges. Instagram's introduction of Stories — a feature closely modeled on Snapchat Stories — in August 2016 significantly impacted Snapchat's user growth. The competition from Instagram, which benefited from Facebook's larger user base and advertising infrastructure, became a persistent challenge for the company.

In early 2018, a controversial redesign of the Snapchat app, undertaken under Spiegel's direction, drew significant backlash from users. The redesign separated content from friends and content from publishers and brands, fundamentally changing the app's navigation. A petition on Change.org against the redesign garnered over a million signatures, and the company subsequently reversed some of the changes. The episode highlighted the tensions between Spiegel's design-driven approach and user expectations.

Despite these setbacks, Snap Inc. continued to grow its daily active user base and made progress toward profitability. The company invested heavily in augmented reality technology, with Spiegel consistently articulating a vision of AR as the company's long-term future. Snap's AR platform enabled developers to create Lenses and experiences that overlaid digital content onto the physical world through the Snapchat camera.

Augmented Reality and Spectacles

Spiegel's long-term strategic vision for Snap Inc. has centered on augmented reality. Under his leadership, the company has invested substantially in AR research and development, building one of the most widely used AR platforms in the world through Snapchat's Lens Studio. By the mid-2020s, Snapchat users were engaging with AR lenses billions of times, and the technology had expanded from simple face filters to more complex experiences including try-on features for commerce and educational overlays.

The company continued to develop its Spectacles hardware line, iterating through multiple generations. In November 2025, Spiegel discussed his bet on smart glasses in a conversation with Bloomberg, outlining his belief that AR glasses would eventually become a primary computing platform. However, in February 2026, TechCrunch reported that a key executive on Snap's Spectacles project had departed the company at a critical moment, as Snap was preparing for the public release of its latest VR glasses.

Recent Leadership and Public Commentary

In September 2025, marking the fourteenth anniversary of Snap Inc., Spiegel sent a company-wide letter reflecting on the company's growth and evolution. The letter came during a period in which Spiegel was also engaging more publicly in technology policy discussions. In September 2025, he appeared at the Council on Foreign Relations for a Bernard L. Schwartz Lecture, where he discussed the growth of Snap, implications of technological innovation on data privacy, and the evolving landscape of social media regulation.

In February 2026, Spiegel authored an opinion piece in the Financial Times addressing Australia's social media ban for users under 16, describing the policy as a "high-stakes experiment" and raising questions about its effectiveness. The Australian Financial Review reported on Spiegel's comments, noting that the Snap CEO argued the ban was "backfiring."

In a December 2025 interview with Business Insider, Spiegel discussed his approach to managing the pressures of running a public technology company, suggesting that reframing stress as a "gift" and an "opportunity" could have a "huge impact on your ability to manage it."

Spiegel's tenure as CEO has not been without criticism. In December 2025, Yahoo Finance listed Spiegel among its candidates for "Worst CEOs of the Year," citing Wall Street skepticism about Snapchat's parent company's future prospects. Snap's stock price has experienced significant volatility since its IPO, and the company has faced persistent questions about its ability to compete for advertising revenue against larger rivals.

Personal Life

Spiegel began a relationship with Australian model Miranda Kerr in 2015. Kerr, previously married to actor Orlando Bloom, was introduced to Spiegel at a Louis Vuitton event. In 2015, Kerr introduced Spiegel to her parents during a visit to Australia.

In July 2016, Spiegel and Kerr announced their engagement. The couple married on May 27, 2017, in an intimate ceremony at their home in Los Angeles.

Spiegel and Kerr have three children together. Their first son, Hart, was born in May 2018. Their second son, Myles, was born in October 2019. The couple's third child was born subsequently, though fewer details about the birth were made public.

The couple purchased a home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Spiegel holds both American and French citizenship.

Recognition

Spiegel has received attention as one of the youngest chief executives of a major technology company. In 2015, he became the youngest billionaire in the world, a distinction that brought significant media coverage. His leadership of Snap Inc. through its IPO in 2017 — one of the largest technology public offerings in years — further established his profile in the technology and business worlds.

Spiegel has been featured in numerous business and technology publications and has appeared on various lists recognizing influential figures in technology. His September 2025 appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations for the Bernard L. Schwartz Lecture series placed him alongside other major technology and business leaders who have participated in the program.

At the same time, Spiegel's leadership has drawn scrutiny. The leaked fraternity emails from his Stanford years created an early reputational challenge, and Snap's stock performance has been a source of ongoing debate among investors and analysts. Yahoo Finance's inclusion of Spiegel on its "Worst CEOs of the Year" list for 2025 reflected continued Wall Street skepticism about the company's trajectory under his leadership.

Legacy

Evan Spiegel's impact on digital communication has been most evident in the concept of ephemeral messaging, which Snapchat introduced to mainstream audiences. Before Snapchat, social media platforms were built around the principle of permanent content — posts, photos, and videos that accumulated over time to form a persistent online identity. Snapchat's disappearing messages fundamentally challenged this model and influenced a generation of social media design. The 24-hour Story format, first introduced by Snapchat under Spiegel's direction, was subsequently adopted by Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Twitter (now X), and LinkedIn, making it one of the most widely replicated product features in social media history.

Spiegel's positioning of Snap Inc. as a "camera company" also reflected a broader thesis about the centrality of visual communication in digital life. Under his leadership, Snap invested heavily in augmented reality at a time when the technology was still nascent, helping to popularize AR filters and experiences for hundreds of millions of users. The company's Lens Studio platform enabled independent developers and brands to create AR content, contributing to the broader development of the AR ecosystem.

The company's trajectory under Spiegel also illustrates the challenges faced by independent social media companies competing against larger platform conglomerates. Snap's experience with Instagram's adoption of Stories and the broader competitive pressure from Meta Platforms has been cited in technology industry discussions about platform competition and innovation.

Spiegel's decision in 2013 to reject Facebook's $3 billion acquisition offer remains one of the most discussed moments in recent technology business history, representing both the ambition of a young founder and the inherent risk of operating independently in an industry dominated by larger competitors.