Filipino-American Bobby Murphy, co-founder of popular mobile app Snapchat, made it to this year’s Forbes list of world billionaires.
Murphy, 26, is the world’s second-youngest billionaire, while his Snapchat co-founder and fraternity brother Evan Spiegel, 24, is the youngest, according to Forbes. Each has a net worth of $1.5 billion.
Forbes says Murphy grew up in Berkeley, California, where his parents are state employees. His mother emigrated from the Philippines.
Murphy and Spiegel, Snapchat’s co-founders
Murphy took mathematical and computational science at Stanford University where he met Spiegel. Along with a third fraternity brother, Reggie Brown, the duo launched an app called Picaboo in 2011, but it got little traction.
The two rebranded the app as Snapchat, which started to take off in late 2011, growing its user base to 200 million people today.
“We weren’t cool,” Murphy once told Forbes of their college experience. “So we tried to build things to be cool.”
Snapchat’s early success wasn’t without controversy, however. A nasty dispute with Brown hung over the company for months, starting in late 2013. Brown claimed he came up with the initial idea for the app, and therefore, should have had ownership rights. The dispute was settled out of court in September 2014.
Snapchat allows you to send a photo or video with a message to your contacts and the message disappears in 10 seconds or less. The tech startup was reported to have turned down a US$3 billion buyout offer from Facebook in 2013. It was a good decision, it seems, as the company is now valued at an “eye-popping” US$19 billion following new funding, according to Forbes. Forbes estimates Murphy owns at least a 15 percent stake.
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