Snap may have lost $720 million in 2017, but Evan Spiegel was probably paid more than any other US CEO (SNAP)

pulse

February 23, 2018 10:26 AM

Snap's market cap is about a third of Apple's or Google's.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel received a massive payout in 2017, being awarded $638 million in stock and compensation the year the firm went public.
That's probably a higher payout than any other CEO in the US, the data firm Equilar told the Financial Times.
That's astonishing given Snap lost $720 million in 2017 and is not nearly as big as the very profitable Apple and Google in terms of revenue or market cap.

Last year, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel got paid more than the heads of some of the world's biggest companies, including Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, the CEOs of Apple and Google.

In fact, he was probably the best-paid CEO in America, according to the data firm Equilar, which tracks executive pay in the US. Spiegel received a massive $638 million (£456 million) stock and compensation payout after Snap floated last year.

Speaking with the Financial Times, Dan Marcec, an Equilar spokesman, said: "It is very rare for us to see an award that large. I would be surprised if we saw a larger one for 2017."

We already know how much Pichai and Cook were paid last year. Cook made $12.8 million (£9.2 million), while Pichai made almost $200 million (£143 million), according to filings.

Apple and Google are among the top five firms globally by market cap and were massively profitable in 2017. Each of the companies is nearing a $1 trillion (£715 billion) market cap, while Snap is lingering at about $22 billion.

Snap also has yet to turn a profit, losing $720 million (£515 million) last year. It's a much younger company, but it's had a rough first year as a public firm.

When it first went public, investors worried how much money Snap could make from advertising compared with the competition. Snap's camera-enabled glasses, Snap Spectacles, were also a failure. And users have decried the Snapchat app's recent redesign — so much so that skeptical Wall Street analysts last week downgraded Snap's stock.

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