Snap closed at $6.02 on Friday. Down 90.17% over five years. Market cap sitting around $10 billion — a number that used to have a six in front of it. The 52-week low is $3.81, and the chart looks less like a stock and more like a ski slope designed by someone who hates skiers.
This week, the company announced it is laying off 16% of its global workforce — roughly 1,000 people. That’s the third major round of layoffs in four years. 20% in 2022. 10% in early 2024. 16% now. If your company is doing mass layoffs on an 18-month cycle, you don’t have a strategy. You have a panic attack on repeat.
Oh, and the $400 million deal with Perplexity — the one announced with fanfare in November 2025, supposedly the AI lifeline for Snapchat — is dead. Not delayed. Not renegotiated. Dead. Perplexity’s CEO reportedly unfollowed Evan Spiegel on X. That’s not a negotiation stalling. That’s a breakup.
And Spiegel, the man who has been at the controls of this slow-motion train wreck for nine straight years as a public-company CEO, cannot be fired. Shareholders have no say on his pay. No vote on his direction. No recourse. None. We’ll get to why in a minute.
Let’s take this apart.
The $400 Million Deal That Evaporated
In November 2025, Snap announced a partnership with Perplexity AI. The headline number was $400 million in cash and equity — roughly 7% of Snap’s entire 2025 revenue — paid to Snap to embed Perplexity’s AI search inside Snapchat. For a company bleeding money, a $400M windfall was supposed to be the adrenaline shot that bought time for the Specs hardware pivot.
It never rolled out. Snap’s Q4 earnings call in February already had executives mumbling about “disagreements on terms.” By April, it was over. Rosenblatt pulled the entire $400 million projected windfall out of its 2026 model. The ~$500M in annualized cost savings from the layoffs? They exactly offset the Perplexity revenue that just disappeared. Do the math: Snap is laying off 1,000 people to replace cash that was supposed to come for free.
Think about what this actually means. The hottest AI search company on the planet decided that Snap — a distribution platform with 474 million daily users — wasn’t worth doing business with at any price the two sides could agree on. Perplexity would rather launch its own Comet browser, ink a deal with Motorola, and go direct-to-consumer than sit in an integration meeting with Snap’s product team.
When your potential partners would rather do anything else than work with you, that’s not a dealmaking problem. That’s a reputation problem.
Third Round, Same Excuses
Here’s the history, in case you missed it:
• 2022: Snap cuts 20% of staff. Framed as post-ATT (Apple privacy rules) adjustment.
• Early 2024: Another 10% cut. Framed as “flatter org structure”.
• April 2026: 16% more gone. Framed as “separating legacy Snapchat from Specs.”
Three distinct narratives. One actual story: the business doesn’t work and the CEO keeps reshuffling deck chairs. The current cut is especially revealing because of the carve-out. The part of the company being protected — even growing — is Specs Inc., the AR glasses unit. The part being gutted is Snapchat itself. The actual business that actually makes money is being starved to fund the moonshot that hasn’t shipped a consumer product in a decade.
Alex Heath at Sources called this “Snap’s crucible moment.” That’s generous. A crucible forges something stronger. Snap has been in a crucible for five straight years. If nothing has been forged by now, maybe there was never anything to forge.
The Specs Fantasy
Let me be specific about the numbers here, because they’re stunning.
• Snap has spent over $3 billion on AR glasses over roughly a decade.
• Six generations of Spectacles. None of them consumer products. The early ones were marketing novelties you could buy from yellow vending machines. The later ones were developer kits.
• Snap tried to raise $1 billion for the Specs Inc. spinoff. The talks went nowhere.
• In February 2026, the SVP running Specs, Scott Myers, “blew up” with Spiegel and departed. At the exact moment the company was supposedly gearing up for launch.
• Spiegel’s famous quote on the Q4 call: “We’re so close to launch.” That was February. No launch date has been confirmed. No price. No hardware in anyone’s hands.
Meanwhile, the category they’re entering is a graveyard. Google Glass: dead. Magic Leap: $3 billion raised, essentially dead. Apple Vision Pro: a $3,500 paperweight that Apple is already walking back. Meta’s Ray-Bans are the only thing working, and they already own the smart-glasses mindshare. Qualcomm, who just signed a multi-year chip deal with Snap’s Specs unit, is powering Meta’s glasses too. Guess who has the volume commitments and the distribution? Not Snap.
So Snap is burning its social-media business to fund a hardware bet in a category where a trillion-dollar competitor with actual retail partnerships is already winning. If that’s the strategy, fine. But then why are we still calling this a social media company? And why is anyone still pretending the ads business is going to come back?
The Kingdom, Not A Company
Here is the part that makes all the above structural, not fixable.
Evan Spiegel and co-founder Bobby Murphy control Snap through a dual-class stock structure. At IPO, the two of them held roughly 45% of the economic ownership and over 70% of the voting power. They have a proxy agreement between them: if one dies or is incapacitated, the other inherits the vote. Together they are a block no outside shareholder can touch.
Snap went public with zero voting rights for its Class A shareholders. Not reduced voting. Not dual-class with some input. Zero. It was so extreme that major index providers (S&P, FTSE Russell) refused to add Snap to their indexes for years. If you own Snap stock, you are not a shareholder in the classical sense. You are an audience member.
Say-on-pay votes? Don’t exist at Snap. Shareholder input on Spiegel’s compensation? Doesn’t exist. His base salary is $1 — the same theatrical humility Zuckerberg and Ellison have performed for years — while his stock awards have made him one of the highest-paid executives in public-company history. In 2017, his IPO grant was worth $638 million. Google-parent Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai made headlines with packages half that size while running a profitable business. Spiegel runs a business that has never posted a GAAP profit.
And when things go sideways? Spiegel doesn’t even have to stick around. He obtained French citizenship in 2018 through a cultural-contribution clause that waives residency. He sits on the board of private equity giant KKR. He sits on the board of the Gagosian Gallery. He married a supermodel. He has every soft landing a billionaire can buy.
He is not in the foxhole with shareholders. He owns the foxhole, the rifles, and the exit door. Everyone else is along for the ride.
The Insider Tell
Want to know what the people who actually run Snap think about Snap’s future? Don’t listen to the earnings call. Look at the Form 4 filings.
CTO Bobby Murphy — co-founder, second-largest shareholder, the technical brain of the company — sold 2,000,000 shares in early February 2026. At prices ranging from $5.19 to $5.43. That is at or near the absolute all-time low of the stock. $10.6 million pocketed. The sales were done via a pre-planned 10b5-1 trading plan, which is the polite way of saying: “I scheduled this sell-down months ago because I knew what was coming.”
Here’s the kicker. According to the Form 4 record, Murphy has made 19 insider transactions over the past five years. All 19 are sells. Zero buys. Not a single open-market purchase.
When not one person who actually runs the company has bought a single share of their own stock in five straight years — not at $5, not at $8, not at $40 — that’s not noise. That’s a flare gun. The people with the best information about the future of Snap are all heading for the exits, slowly and carefully, on pre-planned schedules so they don’t look like they’re panicking.
Compare that to companies where CEOs make public open-market purchases as a signal of conviction. You won’t find that here. Ever.
The Structural Problem Nobody Wants to Name
In 2021, Apple rolled out App Tracking Transparency. Overnight, Snap’s ad targeting — the actual thing that generated the revenue — got broken. Five years later, Snap has never recovered. Meta adapted by rebuilding its ad stack and is now growing revenue at 20%+. Snap grew 11% in 2025 and ran a $460 million GAAP loss. And lost daily active users sequentially in Q4 — the first time that’s happened since Q2 2018. Seven years of growth, gone.
The user base is shrinking for the first time in seven years. Teens are aging out. TikTok ate the youth demo. Instagram ate the aesthetic. YouTube ate the attention. And now AI search — from OpenAI, Perplexity, Google — is eating the top-of-funnel ad engagement that was supposed to be Snap’s remaining moat.
Snap doesn’t have a product problem. Snap has a platform-dependency problem in an industry where platform dependencies are the thing that kills companies. Its entire monetization layer was built on top of data pipes that Apple cut in 2021 and that no amount of “AI-powered Smart Campaign Solutions” marketing copy is going to reopen.
What Happens Next
Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. Nothing in this article is investment advice. Do your own research. Talk to a licensed professional before buying, selling, or shorting any security. I hold no position in SNAP.
With that out of the way — the writing is on the wall.
A company with:
• A shrinking user base (first sequential DAU decline in seven years)
• A structural advertising disadvantage since 2021
• A CEO who cannot be removed by shareholders
• Three rounds of mass layoffs in four years
• A failed $400M AI partnership with the company most likely to define search in the next decade
• A decade-long hardware pet project that has never produced a consumer product
• A 52-week low of $3.81 that the stock keeps trying to rediscover
• Zero insider buys across 19 Form 4 filings over five years
…is not a turnaround story. It’s a slow bleed with a marketing department.
Snap probably doesn’t die tomorrow. Their balance sheet still carries enough cash to run the lights for a while. Some hedge fund will keep a long position as an AR optionality bet. The stock will have its algorithmic bounces. Analysts will post Buy ratings with $8 price targets because $8 is comfortably above where we are now and nobody gets fired for being wrong on Snap.
But the story is over. The only real question is whether Spiegel can duct-tape a hardware company onto the hull of the social platform before the social platform fully sinks. My money says no. Meta will launch consumer AR glasses at scale. Apple will pivot Vision Pro down-market. Google will dust off Glass. Samsung will show up. And Snap — the six-foot-deep scrappy underdog with $3B in sunk cost and a CEO nobody can fire — will be right where it’s always been. Late to its own party.
The Real Headline
Let’s be honest about what this story actually is.
A 36-year-old founder with $1 salary and 44% of the voting power torched roughly $75 billion of shareholder value between the 2021 peak and today. In any normal public company that would be the end of his tenure. The board would have replaced him. An activist investor would have rolled in with a proxy fight. Something — anything — would have happened.
At Snap, none of that is possible. Spiegel designed the company so it couldn’t happen. And now, nine years into a public-markets horror show, the lesson is finally sinking in: when you buy stock in a company where the CEO controls the vote, you are not buying ownership. You are buying permission to watch.
Snap is the cautionary tale for every dual-class IPO that came after it. It’s the argument for shareholder voting rights. It’s the argument for activist-friendly governance. And it’s the argument for a lot of us, who have been watching this slow-motion crash from the sidelines for almost a decade, to finally say out loud what the charts have been screaming: this company is done. The CEO just hasn’t buried the body yet.
Snap, crackle, collapse. We’ve all seen enough.