On Tuesday, we reported about the top 10 richest men in the Philippines according to the annual list published by Forbes magazine. Learning that Filipinos are doing well in business gave us great pride, but there’s one more surprising fact we might have overlooked – something breathtaking about this elite circle of billionaires.
If there is a specific list for the richest men per country, there is also an exclusive list for each age group. As for the youngest billionaire’s list, did you now that the second to top this is a Filipino-American?
Bobby Murphy, 26, is a co-founder of Snapchat a popular temporary photo-messaging app. With an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion, Murphy comes second only to his co-founder Evan Spiegel – the world’s youngest billionaire who is 24 years old.
The app they developed is currently valued at $10 billion and has 100 million users a month. According to Forbes, both Murphy and Spiegel are estimated to have a 15 percent stake each in Snapchat.
Bobby Murphy who grew up in Berkeley, California is a son of a Filipina mother who migrated from the Philippines. Forbes described Murphy as the son of state employees from Berkeley.
The advent of Murphy and Spiegel’s brotherhood started while they were students at Stanford University, both being members of the Kappa Sigma fraternity. Murphy was a mathematics and computational science major, while Spiegel was in the product-design program.
Asked on an interview with Forbes magazine in 2013, Murphy said that they tried to build things to be cool because in college they were not cool. And so they first worked together to develop online software called Future Freshmen, but unfortunately it didn’t strive.
Their next project came when a fellow Stanford student and friend, Reggie Brown suggested for an app to send disappearing photos. Brown would later sue the company for ownership.
Murphy who had just graduate was tappe by Spiegel to develop the app they originally name Picaboo. But the name was already used by a photobook company and so after receiving a cease-and-desist letter. They change the app’s name to ‘Snapchat’ of which Spiegel called as the ‘biggest blessing ever’.
“Evan and I got start Snapchat in the summer of 2011, basically understood that visual content that was the most engaging, interesting form of content there was. We wanted to create a way that would enable that to be a means of communication, rather than a piece of content around which communication actually happens,” Murphy said during a Google Cloud Platform Live session in 2014.
If the good-looking Spiegel is outspoke public face of Snapchat. Murphy on the other hand is the brains who developed the app being the chief technology officer (CTO).
“I’d describe him almost like a monk. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him upset,” Snapchat’s first employee David Kravitz told Forbes in 2013.
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(Watch the video of a live interview with Bobby Murphy below.)
