Earlier this week, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and his wife, model and entrepreneur Miranda Kerr, drew attention for a significant charitable effort: helping eliminate $550 million in medical debt for more than 261,000 people in California.
It is, without question, a deeply meaningful contribution. Medical debt remains one of the most punishing financial burdens in the United States. No one chooses cancer, shops around for a heart attack, or plans their household finances around a devastating accident, a premature birth, or a sudden diagnosis. When wealthy individuals use their resources to relieve that burden for hundreds of thousands of people, the impact deserves recognition.
But as the story spread across media outlets and social platforms, a key detail was often blurred. Many headlines and posts suggested that Spiegel and Kerr had personally donated $550 million.
Given Spiegel’s reported net worth of roughly $2 billion, that would amount to more than a quarter of his fortune—an extraordinary act by any measure. Some coverage even placed him in the same conversation as MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, whose large-scale giving has totaled tens of billions of dollars in recent years.
The important distinction is this: Spiegel and Kerr did not write a $550 million check. Based on how these debt-relief programs typically work, their actual donation was likely closer to about $5 million. That is still a major gift—but the mechanics matter.
OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images
How The Medical Debt Math Actually Works
The couple gave an undisclosed multimillion-dollar sum to Undue Medical Debt, a nonprofit organization that purchases bundles of medical debt at steep discounts and then cancels what patients owe. The widely cited $550 million represents the original face value of the debt forgiven, not the amount of money Spiegel and Kerr contributed.
According to Undue Medical Debt, every $10 donated typically wipes out around $1,000 in medical debt. In simpler terms, each donated dollar can cancel roughly $100 of medical obligations.
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.
