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Tech

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel Just Got a Lot Richer

By
Jonathan Vanian
Jonathan Vanian
By
Jonathan Vanian
Jonathan Vanian
March 2, 2017, 2:39 PM ET

Investors may be happy about Snap’s booming initial public offering, but no one is probably happier than CEO Evan Spiegel.

The 26 year-old is now worth around $5.5 billion after shares in his company made their public trading debut on Thursday.

The amount, on paper, at least, puts Spiegel in a rarified club of tech billionaires alongside Bill Gates, Google co-founder Larry Page, and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Fellow Snap co-founder Bobby Murphy, 28, is also worth around $5.5 billion.

As part of the IPO, Spiegel and Murphy cashed out a small part of their holdings by selling 16 million shares each, according to a regulatory filing. Although Snap (SNAP) originally priced its IPO at $17 per share, investor enthusiasm for the company behind popular messaging app Snapchat lifted those shares 52% to $25.88 in mid-day trading.

That means Spiegel and Murphy just made $217 million each in Snap’s IPO. The two co-founders still own nearly 211 million Snap shares each.

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In addition to his stock based wealth, Spiegel earned $503,205 in salary in 2016, which research firm Equilar said makes for the biggest salary of any CEO of a privately held company prior to its public market debut in the past six years. For comparison, Match (MTCH) CEO Sam Yagan’s 2014 salary was $500,000 while Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s 2011 salary was $483,333 prior to their IPOs.

Spiegel also pocketed a $1 million bonus, the biggest CEO bonus of a pre-IPO company in the past six years, Equilar said.

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But like how videos and messages disappear on Snapchat, so too will Spiegel’s big salary. His salary will drop to $1 after Snap’s IPO, just like Zuckerberg, Equilar said based on corporate regulatory filings.

Lucky for Spiegel, he has plenty of shares to sell if he needs some quick cash.

About the Author
By Jonathan Vanian
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Jonathan Vanian is a former Fortune reporter. He covered business technology, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, data privacy, and other topics.

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