Second youngest billionaire is Fil-American

Second youngest billionaire is Fil-American

BOBBY MURPHY, 27 (Photo Credit: Forbes)

Bobby Murphy, a 27 year old Filipino-American who is the co-founder of the photo and messaging app Snapchat, is the second youngest billionaire in the world. Murphy’s Snapshot co-founder, Evan Spiegel, at 25, is the youngest billionaire, according to Forbes magazine.

Murphy, whose net worth as of Feb. 7, 2016, was placed at $1.8 billion, is ranked Number 14 on the Forbes 2015 List of America’s Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40. Speigel, whose net worth is $2.1 billion, is ranked No. 12.

Number one on the list of the 21 billionaires is Mark Zuckerberg, founder, chairman and CEO of Facebook, with net worth placed at $47.1 billion.

Murphy has a Bachelor of Arts/ Science Degree, major in mathematics and computational science, from Stanford University. He met his co-founder Spiegel at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house at Stanford in 2011.

They first worked together to develop Future Freshmen, an online software, but this didn’t take off. Then, together with a third fraternity brother, Reggie Brown, the three launched an app called Picaboo, which did not also do as well as they had hoped.

The app, however, was later improved and rebranded as Snapchat, allowing users to message photos and videos with caption and graphics which disappears in about 10 minutes. Only then did it start to attract users.

“The app continues to capture more interest from investors as it gains popularity, now boasting almost 100 million daily users, many of whom are millenials,” according to Forbes.

In 2013, they declined an offier form Facebook’s Zuckerberg to purchase Snapchat for $3 million.

A year and a half later, Snapchat repeortedly scored a valuation as high as $19 billion.

Murphy, who lives in Venice, California, is the son of California state employees. His mother, a Cebuana, emigrated to the US where she raised her family in Berkeley.

Nothing much is known about Murphy, whose seemingly laid-back personality is the opposite of Spiegel’s reported brash style.

David Kravitz, Snapchat’s first employee, had reportedly described Murphy as some kind of an unflappable person, as he once told Forbes in 2013.

“I’d describe him almost like a monk…I don’t think I’ve ever seen him upset,” Kravitz had old Forbes magazine in 2013.

(M. Astorga-Garcia)