- Evan Spiegel is best known as the CEO of Snap.
- However, he was briefly listed as a VP of product at Meta on LinkedIn — as a gag by an employee.
- Meta's platforms have copied features from Snap over the years, such as Stories.
Evan Spiegel doesn't work at Meta, but if you're looking at his LinkedIn, you might have thought he did.
The Snap cofounder and CEO said in an interview with Bloomberg published Monday that one of his employees temporarily put on his profile that he was "VP Product @ Meta" as a gag. (His LinkedIn profile no longer shows that.)
The joke appears to be a dig at Meta, which has taken a few pages from Snapchat's book over the years when it comes to features.
For example, Snapchat was the first to introduce user Stories that disappear after a while, rolling out a feature in 2013 that let users post photos and videos that'd vanish after 24 hours.
Meta in 2016 unveiled its own Stories feature on Instagram, and Facebook got them the following year. WhatsApp debuted a similar feature called Status also in 2017.
Facebook offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion in 2013, but Spiegel's company declined. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reached out to Spiegel in 2016 to try again.
Zuckerberg has been asked about the striking similarities between some of the companies' offerings before.
In a 2017 earnings call, he talked about what was at the time called Facebook's Camera Effects Platform.
"I think we were a little bit late to the trend initially around making cameras the center of how sharing works," he said. "But I do think at this point we're pretty much ahead in terms of the technology that we're building, and making an open platform, I think, is a big step forward. A lot of people are using these products across our family of apps. And I would expect us to continue leading the way forward on this from this point on."
Snapchat had previously unveiled animated AR selfie masks and filters.
More recently, Snapchat showed off its newest AR glasses, called Spectacles, last year, days before Zuckerberg announced Meta's competing Orion glasses.
Meta and Snap did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
