Snapchat billionaires see fortunes plummet by more than 80%

The fortunes of Snap co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy are disappearing just as fast as they were made.

Shares of Snap plunged after it reported its slowest quarterly sales growth ever. After the latest decline, Spiegel, 32, the company’s chief executive officer, has a net worth of $US2.3 billion ($3.6 billion), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. On this day last year, he was worth $US13.9 billion. The fall represents a drop of more than 83 per cent.

Murphy, 34, the company’s chief technology officer, has seen his wealth plunge 81 per cent in 2022 to $US1.9 billion.

The owner of photo messaging app Snapchat is the first of the major tech firms to report quarterly earnings, and the results cast a shadow for other platforms that rely on advertising revenue such as Facebook owner Meta Platforms Alphabet’s Google and Pinterest, which report their results this week.

The group is competing for a shrinking pool of advertising dollars as spiralling inflation and weaker economic growth is putting pressure on companies and consumer spending. Meanwhile, new rules from Apple that require all apps to get smartphone users’ permission to be tracked online have made it more difficult for advertisers to measure and manage their ad campaigns.

Snap is among the companies that rode the highs of the pandemic, with its stock price peaking in September 2021 at $US83. That entire rally has been erased: Shares tumbled as much as 32 per cent on Friday to $US7.33, the lowest since February 2019, bringing the year-to-date decline to 84 per cent.

“Weakness in brand advertising appears to be the main source of the steep deceleration,” Brent Thill, analyst at Jefferies, wrote in a note. “It’s difficult to parse out how many of Snap’s issues are transitory.”

All told, Spiegel and Murphy are among the dozen billionaires tracked by Bloomberg who have seen the biggest percentage drop in their wealth this year. Others who have lost more include Ernie Garcia II and Ernie Garcia III, the father-son duo behind used-car dealer Carvana Co., and Forrest Li, chief executive officer of Singapore-based Sea Ltd.