Lately, the press hasn't been kind to Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel.
He's been portrayed as a brute who screwed over a former friend to found Snapchat. There's a profile that paints him as a stuck-up brat. And people are angry he hasn't apologized to the 4.6 million users whose accounts were hacked on Snapchat.
Today, Forbes has a feature article on Snapchat and the intro plays right into Spiegel's negative profile:
According to Forbes, Mark Zuckerberg emailed Evan Spiegel to speak, and Spiegel gave a disrespectful response:
"Mark Zuckerberg, the richest twenty something in history, reached out to Snapchat's Evan Spiegel…with an invitation, delivered to his personal email account: Come to Menlo Park and Let's get to know each other. Spiegel…responded to his role model thusly: I'm happy to meet you… if you come to me."
Spiegel's response sounds arrogant. What no-name startup founder tells a CEO worth $20 billion to fly to him?
But in a tweet to Business Insider, Spiegel refuted the Forbes report, saying the email exchange between he and Zuckerberg was much more cordial.
He even provided a screenshots of the emails:
But those emails don't explain why Forbes got the intro of its story incorrect. It turns out, when Forbes interviewed Spiegel, Spiegel bragged about giving Zuckerberg the cold shoulder.
In response to Spiegel's claims that he's not as arrogant as Forbes made him sound, Forbes posted the transcript of its interview with Spiegel. In the transcript, it's clear that Spiegel told Forbes he said Zuckerberg would have to come to L.A. for the meeting:
So, now we have two transcripts. The first is the original email exchange between Zuckerberg and Spiegel. It's very cordial. The second is Spiegel's account of the exchange to Forbes.
It's the latter transcript that makes it look like Spiegel was bragging about something that didn't actually happen.