Last Updated:February 08, 2025, 13:50 IST

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel recently called himself Vice President of Product at Meta, as a response to Meta’s habit of copying features originally seen on Snapchat.

Meta has even made a billion-dollar offer to buy Evan Spiegel’s app, Snapchat. (Photo Credits: Instagram)

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel recently took a jab at Mark Zuckerberg by updating his LinkedIn bio to claim he was the Vice President of Products at Meta. This move was a sarcastic dig at Zuckerberg’s long history of replicating Snapchat’s features.

Spiegel has previously turned down Meta’s billion-dollar offer to acquire Snapchat, choosing to keep the app independent. However, that didn’t stop Meta from introducing similar features. The most notable example was Instagram Stories, which lets users share photos that disappear after 24 hours—an idea Snapchat pioneered. Meta later extended the feature to Facebook and WhatsApp.

Snapchat was also the first to introduce face filters, a fun way for users to alter their appearances using AR effects. Soon after, Meta added similar features to Instagram and Facebook. The company also launched disappearing messages, closely mirroring Snapchat’s signature feature of sending self-erasing photos and videos.

To mock this long-standing pattern of imitation, Spiegel humorously updated his bio to read:

“Loving husband, father of four boys, VP Product at Meta.”

His playful swipe at Meta isn’t new. Back in 2018, during the Code Conference, Spiegel commented on Meta’s repeated copying, saying:

“The number one feeling for a designer—the best thing in the entire world—is if you design something so simple and elegant that the only thing others can do is copy it exactly. It is the most fantastic triumph in the world.”

He added, “We would appreciate it if they copied our data protection practices too.”

With this latest move, Spiegel once again reminded the tech world of Snapchat’s lasting influence on social media trends—whether Meta admits it or not.

A year earlier, former Instagram VP of Product Kevin Weil spoke at a TechCrunch conference and wasn’t too concerned about the criticism Meta received for copying ideas. He believed that using good ideas to improve their platform wasn’t a bad idea.

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He explained, “I think if we’re being honest with ourselves, this is the way the tech industry works and frankly it’s the way all Industries work. Good ideas start in one place and they spread across the entire industry. So we’ve said multiple times, kudos to Snapchat for being the first to stories but it’s a format and it’s going to be adopted widely across a lot of different platforms.”

He gave an example from his time at Twitter, explaining that hashtags first started there but are now used on many platforms because they help organise information. He also compared it to the movie industry, where Pixar was the first to make computer-animated films, but other studios like DreamWorks also started creating similar movies.

News viral Snap CEO Evan Spiegel Takes A Dig At Meta, Calls Himself ‘VP Of Product’ In LinkedIn Bio

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