Fil-Am Snapchat co-founder world’s 2nd youngest billionaire

MANILA, Philippines – While Snapchat may be one of the hottest mobile applications nowadays, co-founder Bobby Murphy told Forbes that back in college they “weren’t cool.” “So we tried to build things to be cool,” he said.

Filipino American Murphy, one of 3 co-founders of the application, is now listed as one of the world’s 46 billionaires under the age of 40 by Forbes. Murphy’s net worth is estimated at $1.5 billion (about P66 billion), and at age 26, makes him the second youngest billionaire in the world.

Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s CEO, is listed as the world’s youngest billionaire, aged 24. (READ: 12 Filipinos in Forbes’ 2015 billionaires list) 

According to a February 2015 report, his company was valued at $10 billion, with Murphy owning at least 15% of the stake. The Forbes report says Murphy’s parents were employees of the state of California, with one “of whom immigrated from the Philippines.” 

Murphy grew up in Berkeley, California, and received his BS in mathematical and computational science from Stanford University, where he met Snapchat co-founders Spiegel and Reggie Brown, when they were members of the Kappa Sigma fraternity in Stanford. 

Their app was first named “picaboo” in 2011, and when they rebranded and relaunched as Snapchat later that year, their app soared – and they became billionaires.

In Snapchat, users can take photos, record videos, send drawings and text messages to a limited number of recepients, and the message will only exist for a short amount of time. 

Snapchat users were sending 700 million photos and videos per day, while Snapchat Stories content was being viewed 500 million times per day, according to Snapchat’s data. Its user base is now reportedly close to 100 million users.

Spiegel recently described Snapchat in another interview with TIME magazine as a platform that “discards content to focus on the feeling that content brings to you, not the way that content looks.”

Murphy and his Snapchat colleague joins 46 other billionaires under the age of 40, Forbes notes.

They share the list with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Sean Parker; Julio Mario Santo Domingo III, DJ and heir of Colombian brewery Bavaria; Uber’s Travis Kalanick, Ryan Graves, and Garrett Camp; and even blood test developer Elizabeth Holmes, Forbes said.

The combined net worth of the 46 young billionaires? $152.8 billion, or an average of $3.3 billion. – Rappler.com