Fil-Am Snapchat Co-Founder Listed as World’s Second Youngest Billionaire

Bobby Murphy, the 26-year-old Filipino-American co-founder of tech company Snapchat, landed  2nd place in the Forbes’  list of youngest billionaires.

Snapchat, a mobile photo messaging app, was founded by Murphy along with his fellow Stanford student Evan Spiegel. Spiegel, the 24-year-old CEO of Snapchat was proclaimed the world’s youngest billionaire.

Murphy’s Filipina mother moved to the US and worked as a state employee in California. She raised Murphy in Berkeley, California.

He took up Mathematics and Computation Science at the University of Stanford where he met Kappa Sigma fraternity brother Spiegel in 2010. Together with Reggie Brown, another fraternity brother, Murphy and Spiegel launched Picaboo in 2011.

However, the app didn’t get so much attention until it was rebranded as Snapchat. In 2013, social media giant Facebook tried to buy out the company at $3 billion, which they turned down. Currently, it has 200 million users with an “eye-popping” valuation of $19 billion.

Forbes predicts Murphy has a net worth of $1.5 billion reportedly owning at least 15 percent of the stake.

In his interview with Forbes, Murphy said: “We weren’t cool. So we tried to build things to be cool.”