28-year-old Filipino-American Bobby Murphy is the world’s second youngest billionaire.
Reported by Nextshark, Murphy is second only to his 26-year-old Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel.
Forbes lists Murphy as 11th in ‘America’s Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40′. In the world’s richest rankings, Murphy sits at #444, jumping from #1011 last year.
Murphy is estimated to be worth $4 billion.
According to Forbes, Murphy and his Snapchat partner Spiegel are planning a potential $25 billion initial public offering (IPO) for Snap – the new name for Snapchat. The pair turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from social media giants Facebook.
Snap recently debuted its own ‘spectacles’ that can take and share video.
Nextshark adds that Murphy’s mother grew up in the Philippines, emigrating to the US in the 1980s where she met her American husband. Murphy graduated from Stanford University in 2010, where he met Spiegel who was studying product design. Murphy earned a degree majoring in mathematical and computational science.
The pair initially worked on a failed startup called Future Freshmen – an online tool that assisted high school students when applying for college. Murphy created a disappearing-image messaging app called Picaboo whilst at university, which would later become Snapchat in September 2011.
Murphy described Snapchat’s vision during a Google Cloud Platform Live session in 2014:
“Evan and I got started Snapchat in the summer of 2011, basically understood that visual content that was the most engaging, interesting form of content there was. We wanted to create a way that would enable that to be a means of communication, rather than a piece of content around which communication actually happens.”
In August last year, Instagram introduced ‘Stories’ – a new feature that was similar to Snapchat’s format.
