In March 2017, Snap Inc. went public with a $30 billion valuation on its very first day of trading.
That same year, according to Snap's own SEC filings, founder and CEO Evan Spiegel took home total compensation of $637 million.
Almost all of it came from a single stock award, granted the moment the company he controlled became a public company.
Nine years later, the Snapchat maker trades for around $5…
The company has never once posted an annual profit…
And shares are down over 90% from their peak.
Yet Spiegel’s net worth has only continued to increase…
So it’s not alchemy… a company can indeed watch its stock price fall more than 90% from its high… and still make its founder one of the richest men in California at the same time
Not by accident either… SNAP’s entire capital allocation model at this point is to make the C-Suite rich while screwing over shareholders…
You see, Spiegel and co-founder Bobby Murphy hold voting control over the entire company between them.
And in 2025 alone, Snap issued over $1 billion worth of stock-based compensation. That's over a billion dollars in value handed to employees and executives in a single year, funded entirely through diluting existing shareholders…
What’s more, that $1B represents almost 18% of the company’s entire revenue for that year! So the money the company made flows straight back to the executive team…
This dilution is a consistent pattern and SNAP’s entire float is now 67% larger than the day the company went public… meaning management is taking from shareholders and putting that money straight back into their pockets…
And this is exactly the kind of company you should avoid like the plague…
Contrast this to a shareholder friendly company like Mercado Libre (who we recently re-recommended in Capital Gains Multiplier after 135% gains since my initial call)
Where 95% of the C-Suite’s compensation is tied directly to performance metrics that BENEFIT shareholders.
That’s the kind of company I want to own (and do), because the company’s goals align with my goals as a shareholder… rather than a stock like SNAP where they are in direct contrast.
Oliver