Evan Spiegel: Snapchat fratboy

**Simon Jack** (0:00)
It's April 2012 and we are in sunny California, deep inside that hotbed of future billionaires, Stanford University. It's just three weeks until classes break up and final year students are close to graduation. But one young man sitting right at the back of his computing class has lost interest in the lecture. He's staring at his phone, obsessed with an app. He's not sending messages on Facebook, Twitter or even Snapchat. Actually, he created Snapchat. He's looking at his Wells Fargo banking app. He's waiting for a deposit. And there it is, $485,000, an investment that values his company at over $4 million. The moment the money hits the account, the student gets up, walks to the front of the class and tells his professor he's quitting. He's 21 years old and he's just become a millionaire and a college dropout in the same minute. But he's only just beginning.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:55)
Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Each episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

**Simon Jack** (1:02)
We take them from zero to a million and then on from a million to a billion.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:06)
My name is Zing Tsjeng and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

**Simon Jack** (1:09)
My name is Simon Jack and I'm the BBC's business editor.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:11)
And on this episode, we are talking about Evan Spiegel, who is currently worth just under three billion dollars.

**Simon Jack** (1:18)
He's co-creator of Snapchat, a social media app for sending disappearing photos, videos and texts.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:24)
Now, in 2025, over 400 million people use Snapchat every day and over 900 million people worldwide use it monthly.

**Simon Jack** (1:32)
Its highest user base is actually in India, where it has over 200 million users, followed by the US, where over 100 million people now use it.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:40)
Spiegel and his friend Bobby Murphy launched Snapchat in 2011 while they were both studying at Stanford University and they soon dropped out.

**Simon Jack** (1:48)
Yeah, badge of honour dropping out. Within four years, at just 25, Evan would become the world's youngest self-made billionaire.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:56)
So let's tell a story starting from zero to his first million. Evan Spiegel was born in June 1990 in Los Angeles, California. He's the eldest of three children. Both his parents are lawyers. His mother, Melissa, was actually a Harvard law graduate who practiced tax law before having kids. And his dad, John, meanwhile went to Yale Law and is now a partner at a big firm where he's represented clients like Warner Brothers and one of our previous billionaires, Sergey Brin.

**Simon Jack** (2:25)
So fair to say, Evan Spiegel grew up in a privileged household. The house he grew up in cost two million dollars and was in the famously affluent neighbourhood of Pacific Palisades, just east of Malibu in Los Angeles. But there's one thing he didn't have growing up. His parents didn't let him watch TV, which is odd.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:43)
Given the amount of screen time people now spend on apps like Snapchat.

**Simon Jack** (2:47)
Exactly. Instead, they encouraged him to read, which he said did wonders for his imagination. I had a lot of time on my hands, so I like to build stuff, he said.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:55)
Evan went to a very expensive private school called Crossroads for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica. Now it's known for famous alumni like Jonah Hill, Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow. It costs tens of thousands per academic year. And while Evans described himself as someone who had trouble fitting in at school, he says that even if he wasn't confident in himself, he was always confident in his ideas.

**Simon Jack** (3:17)
He didn't play sports, apart from a bit of tennis. Most of his free time was spent, surprise, surprise, like many of our billionaires, in the computer lab.

**Zing Tsjeng** (3:24)
He says he first been exposed to computers when he was about six years old, when his godfather brought over one of the early Macintoshes to show our family. By the time he was in sixth grade, so at about 11 or 12, Evan was demanding his own computer. But his mother said he could only have one if he built it himself. Now, we know he liked to build stuff, so he did just that. He did have some help from a school teacher and he later joked that his best friend in middle school was the computer teacher, Dan. This actually reminds me a lot of Bill Gates. If you remember the episode we did on Bill Gates, his computer teacher encouraged him to play around on the only computer available at that school.