Fil-Am Bobby Murphy Earns Billions After Snapchat IPO

Bobby Murphy, half of the duo that founded the very popular app Snapchat, just became $2.1 billion richer a few days after the company made their initial public offering in the United States. Murphy co-founded Snap, Inc., the mother company of the messaging app Snapchat, with Evan Spiegel.

From an initial of $17 per share, the price went up to $27.09 when the markets closed last Friday, according to a report in Entrepreneur. This made Spiegel and Murphy join the ranks of technology billionaires in just a matter of days. Each has a net worth of about $5.5 billion, which can likely increase if the company continues to perform well. Along with Spiegel, he also controls half of the voting shares.

Fil-Am Bobby Murphy: Snapchat’s Tech Wiz

Spiegel has had more face time with media, given that he is the company’s Chief Executive Officer. Murphy however holds his own, because he co-founded the company with Spiegel. As Chief Technology Officer, he is said to be behind the programming that made Snapchat. He is also said to be in charge of Snap Labs, the division behind the development of new products.

According to the report, both men met in college in Stanford University, where Murphy was into math and computational science while Spiegel was in product design. Their first attempt at a tech start up, Future Freshman, did not fly.

Fil-Am Bobby Murphy on Snapchat

After their failed start-up, Murphy, Spiegel and another friend, Reggie Brown, came up with an app that allowed users to share images that would disappear after they are sent. It was called something else when it started but renamed to Snapchat later.

Murphy described the app as one that allowed the sharing of engaging, visual content. He added, “We wanted to create a way to enable that (sharing of visual content) to be a means of communication rather than a mere piece of content around communication.”

The 28-year old Murphy is the son of Filipina Rose L. Go and American Richard Cornelius Murphy, who are both employed in government in California. His mother grew up in the Philippines, but her family emigrated to the U.S. Murphy grew up in Berkeley, California.