The plunging price of Snap’s stock is having a brutal effect on the fortunes of the company’s cofounders.
Evan Spiegel, who is also CEO of the company, has seen his net worth fall 83% in the past year, as of Friday, according to Bloomberg. Spiegel was worth $13.9 billion on Oct. 21, 2021, and currently is worth about $2.3 billion.
Cofounder and CTO Bobby Murphy saw his worth fall 81% to $1.9 billion, per Bloomberg.
While the losses are on paper and both founders are still billionaires, the sharp drop underscores Snapchat’s troubled position in the social media space these days. The company recently posted a $360 million quarterly net loss and has been having trouble attracting advertisers. This comes as user growth is stagnating, but hasn’t quite come to a halt.
Snap has announced plans to lay off roughly 20% of its staff and reportedly plans to give up its San Francisco offices. It has also shut down its Web3 team in the past month, along with several projects including a social mapping app; an app that would have allowed people to write songs collaboratively; and a drone selfie camera.
Spiegel, in May, warned of dire times to come, saying in a memo that macroeconomic challenges were leading to a growth slowdown at Snapchat, noting there has been a significant cutback in digital ad spending owing to the toxic combination of rising interest rates, sky-high inflation, supply-chain challenges, and the war in Ukraine.
That letter was one of the earlier executive warnings to highlight the fast changing economic conditions at the time.
Murphy and Spiegel are hardly the only corporate leaders to see their net worth nose-dive in the past year.
Carvana cofounder and CEO Ernest Garcia III has seen his drop 94% in the past year. His father, Ernie Garcia II, is down 76%. And Shopify founder and CEO Tobias Lütke is down 76%.
Overall, says Bloomberg, the world’s 500 richest people have seen their collective net worth fall by almost $1.7 trillion since the start of the year.
