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The fabulous life of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, one of the world's youngest billionaires

Life is good for Evan Spiegel.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel.

His company, Snap Inc., is preparing for one of the most hotly anticipated initial public offerings of 2017 at a potential valuation of $25 billion.

And with an estimated net worth of $5 billion, Spiegel, 26, is one of the youngest billionaires in the world.

He lives a charmed life and he knows it.

"I am a young, white, educated male," the Snapchat creator once said at a Stanford business conference. "I got really, really lucky. And life isn't fair."

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We've pulled the highlights of Spiegel's spectacular life and career from profiles by LA Weekly, Forbes, Business Insider, court documents, and more.

Spiegel grew up in the Pacific Palisades, a ritzy Los Angeles enclave just east of Malibu. He is the older son of two Ivy League-educated lawyers. His parents divorced when he was in high school.

When Spiegel turned 16 and got his driver's license, he was given a Cadillac Escalade, which he parked in the gated Southern California Edison parking lot next to his school. Spiegel's father represented Edison during the energy crisis.

Source: LA Weekly

Spiegel spent his early years at an ultra-exclusive school called Crossroads in Santa Monica, which costs tens of thousands per academic year. Other notable alumni include Tinder cofounder Sean Rad, Kate Hudson, Jonah Hill, Jack Black, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

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Around the time that he landed a marketing internship with Red Bull, Spiegel decided that he wanted a more fuel-efficient car to drive around the city in. In a letter from 2008, Spiegel asked his parents to lease him a BMW 550i, which retails for about $75,000. "Cars bring me sheer joy," he wrote. "I would really appreciate you validating me and all of my hard work by leasing the BMW."

The Spiegels were members of a number of exclusive clubs, including the Jonathan Club in Santa Monica and the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. They often went on trips to Europe, employed a full-time housekeeper, and even went snowboarding by helicopter in Canada. "We live in a bubble," Evan wrote in the letter asking for the BMW.

Source: LA Weekly

Spiegel went on to study product design at Stanford (his father's alma mater), where he met future Snapchat cofounders Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy.

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

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Source: Forbes

The three were members of the Kappa Sigma fraternity. Spiegel was social chair, and judging from leaked emails, he was quite the partier.

In 2014, emails from Spiegel's days at Stanford were leaked. In expletive-laden messages to members of his fraternity, Spiegel made offensive jokes about having sex with women.

Once the emails were publicized, Spiegel issued an apology.

"I'm sorry I wrote them at the time and I was jerk to have written them," he said in 2014. "They in no way reflect who I am today or my views towards women."

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While at Stanford, a friend of the family let Spiegel sit in on a graduate-level class on entrepreneurship and venture capital. In that class he heard talks from tech luminaries like Google CEO Eric Schmidt and YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley.

Source: LA Weekly

Spiegel befriended Intuit founder Scott Cook after he gave a talk at one class. Cook ended up letting Spiegel work on a product Intuit planned to release in India while he worked on his undergrad.

Spiegel dropped out of Stanford just a few credits short of graduation to work on Snapchat full time. The team developed the bulk of the disappearing messages app, which was first called Picaboo, in 2012 while headquartered at Spiegel's dad's house in the Palisades.

Though Snapchat eventually moved to offices on the Venice boardwalk, Spiegel lived at his dad's house for years, in part because "the rent is cheap."

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Reggie Brown filed a lawsuit against Spiegel and Murphy in 2013 after he was forced out of the company and not given equity. The lawsuit was eventually settled, and Snapchat paid Brown $157.5 million to disappear.

Spiegel moved out of his dad's house in November 2014 and bought his own three-bedroom house in Brentwood for $3.3 million.

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.

Shortly after Spiegel turned down the offer from Zuckerberg, Facebook tried to clone Snapchat with a failed app called Poke.

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Source:

In 2014, Spiegel's startup loaned he and cofounder Bobby Murphy $5 million each.

Source: SEC filing

As Snapchat's user base and valuation continued to swell, Spiegel quickly became a bona fide celebrity in the worlds of tech and media. Here he is hanging out with George Lucas and Vice CEO Shane Smith during the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in October 2014.

After Snapchat completed a big funding round in June 2015, Spiegel bought himself a Ferrari.

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Spiegel was romantically linked with pop superstar Taylor Swift for a brief time. The two reportedly met in December 2013 at a New Year's Eve party.

Source: LaineyGossip

Spiegel has been fascinated with the music industry for years, and Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton is Snap's board chairman. Spiegel was reportedly interested in buying Big Machine, the record label that represents Swift, though the deal never went through.

Source: New York Post

Spiegel started dating supermodel Miranda Kerr during the summer of 2015. They first met at a 2014 dinner for Louis Vuitton.

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In May 2016, the couple purchased a 7,164-square-foot house that had been owned by Harrison Ford for $12 million.

Things moved quickly after that: the power couple announced that they were engaged in July 2016.

Spiegel cares about fashion more than most tech CEOs. He made headlines in October 2015 for appearing on the cover of Vogue Italy.

Source: Vogue Italy

He's a licensed helicopter pilot who also enjoys flower arranging. His signature shirt is a James Perse white v-neck, which retails for $60.

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He once told GQ that the shirt has been a "staple since high school."

Source:

Spiegel highly values secrecy in his business dealings as well as his personal life. Snap employees often don't know about products the company is working on until they're announced publicly.

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He often moves across the company’s network of Venice Beach outposts in a black car flanked by his security detail. His security cost $890,399 in 2016.

Source: SEC filings

In February 2016, Snapchat loaned Spiegel $15 million. Snapchat raised $175 million the following month at a $16 billion valuation, and Spiegel repaid his outstanding loans in full later that year.

Source: SEC filings

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In September 2016, Spiegel renamed Snapchat to Snap Inc. and called it a "camera company." He also unveiled camera-equipped sunglasses called Spectacles.

Source: WSJ Magazine

The 26-year-old has been named the youngest self-made billionaire in the world by Forbes for the past two years. He has an estimated net worth of about $5 billion if Snap's public offering values the company at $25 billion.

Source: Forbes

He earned a $503,205 salary in 2016, plus a $1 million bonus. His base salary will be reduced to $1 when Snap goes public, but his roughly 22% ownership of the company makes his net worth much more valuable on paper.

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Source: SEC filings

As he prepares to take his company public around March, he will be pitched to potential investors as a product visionary like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs.

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Email: news@pulselive.co.ke

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