A 0.11% stake in a company that has a single messaging app may not seem like much, but when that company is Snapchat, an 0.11% stake could net you around $16.5 million. That’s exactly what Scott Forstall, an ex-Apple executive, was given when he joined Snapchat as the startup’s adviser. If that seems like a lot of cash for an adviser, keep in mind that Steve Jobs hand picked this guy to design iOS.
Snapchat’s rumored $15 billion valuation means ex-Apple executive and Snapchat advisor Scott Forstall could make $16.5 million or more on what we now know to be a 0.11% stake in the messaging app company, reports TechCrunch. The fact of Forstall’s connection to Snapchat, as well as how much equity he has, only came to light today after Wikileaks made it a lot easier to search through emails from the Sony Pictures hack of late 2014. Sony Pictures president Michael Lynton is a Snapchat board member, and so a lot of the startup’s secrets are out in the open. For his part, Forstall is best known as the guy picked by Steve Jobs to design the original iPhone operating system software, which would later become iOS — beating out future Nest founder Tony Faddell for the job. Forstall would leave Apple in 2013, in the wake of the botched iOS 6 launch (including the Apple Maps debacle) and the subsequent earnings below expectations.
