A few days ago, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and his wife, supermodel and entrepreneur Miranda Kerr, announced an objectively wonderful act of philanthropy: they helped erase $550 million in medical debt for more than 261,000 Californians.
That is a genuinely amazing thing to do. Medical debt is one of the cruelest forms of debt in America. People do not choose to get cancer. They do not comparison-shop their way into a heart attack. They do not plan a family budget around a traumatic accident, a premature birth, or an unexpected diagnosis. So when anyone uses their fortune to wipe away medical debt for hundreds of thousands of people, that person deserves praise.
According to a bunch of outlets that have repeated the story (some very high-quality outlets that should know better), plus everyone on Twitter who just reads and repeats headlines, Evan Spiegel and Miranda Kerr just donated $550 million.
Considering the fact that his net worth is around $2 billion, that would represent a little over a quarter of his fortune. That would indeed be an amazing thing to do. And in fact, some outlets (Fortune!!!) even went so far as to compare Evan to the extreme ultra-philanthropist McKenzie Bezos, Jeff’s ex-wife, who has given away tens of billions of dollars in recent years.
Here’s the problem: Evan and Miranda did not give away $550 million. By my estimation, they probably spent around $5 million. Still cool! But here’s the full story…
OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images
How The Medical Debt Math Actually Works
The couple made an undisclosed multimillion-dollar donation to Undue Medical Debt, a nonprofit that buys medical debt in bulk for pennies on the dollar and then forgives it. The $550 million figure is the face value of the debt erased. It is not the amount of cash Spiegel and Kerr donated.
Undue Medical Debt says that, on average, every $10 donated relieves about $1,000 in medical debt. Put another way, every $1 donated erases roughly $100 of medical debt.
So if Spiegel and Kerr helped erase $550 million of medical debt, the implied cash donation was probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $5.5 million.
Again: that is still fantastic. Five million dollars to relieve medical debt is wonderful. Any meaningful contribution to this cause is worth applauding.
The Snap Backdrop
Spiegel is the co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat. Snap went public in 2017. In the years before COVID, the company generally carried a market cap in the high-teens to roughly $20 billion range.
Then the pandemic happened. With everyone stuck at home, social media and digital advertising stocks exploded. Snap’s market cap reached around $40 billion in October 2020, crossed roughly $100 billion in early 2021, and briefly touched the $130 billion range later that year.
That boom did not last.
Today, Snap’s market cap is around $7.5 billion. Its stock has fallen more than 90% from its pandemic-era highs.
And during its time as a public company, Snap has been an absolute financial disaster.
From 2017 through 2025, Snap reported roughly $11.08 billion in cumulative annual GAAP net losses. Add the first quarter of 2026, when the company lost another $89 million, and the post-IPO total climbs to roughly $11.17 billion.
Here is the year-by-year carnage:
- 2017: $3.445 billion loss
- 2018: $1.256 billion loss
- 2019: $1.034 billion loss
- 2020: $945 million loss
- 2021: $488 million loss
- 2022: $1.430 billion loss
- 2023: $1.322 billion loss
- 2024: $698 million loss
- 2025: $460 million loss
- Q1 2026: $89 million loss
Total since the IPO: approximately $11.17 billion in losses.
And Spiegel Has Done Extremely Well
While the company has set $11+ billion on fire, Evan has done very well.
From 2017 through 2025, his reported compensation (salary, bonuses) totaled roughly $659 million.
But the bigger number is not his salary. It is his stock sales.
Over the last decade, Spiegel has generated roughly $1.36 billion in gross proceeds from Snap stock sales after the IPO. If you include the shares he sold in the IPO itself, the total rises to roughly $1.6 billion.
Put it all together, and the stock investing public has essentially given Evan $2.2 billion in cash (that’s outside of his founder’s shares!!) to set $11 billion (and counting) on fire.
Snap has been public for 9 years. That’s roughly 3,300 days. Over those nine years, Snap shareholders have essentially handed Evan $670,000 EVER SINGLE DAY. That’s $28,000 per hour. In the same period, Snap has lost $3.4 million EVERY SINGLE DAY, roughly $141,000 per hour.
So, in other words, Evan’s $5.5 million donation is equal to about 8 days’ salary, during which time the company he runs set another $27 million on fire.
And after an average hard day of setting cash on fire, Evan goes home to his $100 million Holmby Hills estate or his $30 million Paris apartment, takes off his $2,000 glasses, and lies in bed with his supermodel wife. Or maybe he keeps the glasses on when he gets in bed? That would be kind of interesting. Either way, he’s in the running for living the greatest life of all time.
