Snap may have lost $720 million in 2017, but Evan Spiegel was probably paid more than any other US CEO

Mike Blake/Reuters

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel.

• Snap CEO Evan Spiegel received a massive payout in 2017, being awarded $638 million in stock and compensation the year the firm went public.
• That's probably a higher payout than any other chief executive in the US, data firm Equilar told The Financial Times.
• That's astonishing given Snap lost $720 million in 2017 and is nowhere as big as the very profitable Apple and Google in terms of revenue or market cap.

Last year, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel got paid more than the heads of some of the world's biggest companies, including Apple chief executive Tim Cook and Google boss Sundar Pichai.

In fact, he was probably the best-paid CEO in America, according to data firm Equilar, which tracks executive pay in the US. Spiegel received a massive $638 million (£456 million) stock and compensation payout after Snap floated last year.

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Speaking to The Financial Times, Equilar spokesman Dan Marcec said: "It is very rare for us to see an award that large. I would be surprised if we saw a larger one for 2017."

We already know how much Pichai and Cook were paid last year. Cook made $12.8 million (£9.2 million), while Pichai made almost $200 million (£143 million), according to filings.

It's astonishing that Spiegel was paid more given Apple and Google - both in the top five firms globally by market cap - were massively profitable in 2017. Apple and Google are nearing a $1 trillion (£715 billion) market cap, while Snap is currently lingering at around $22 billion.

Snap has yet to turn a profit, and in fact, lost $720 million (£515 million) last year. It's a much younger company, but it's had a rough first year as a public firm.

When it first went public, investors worried how much money Snap could make from advertising versus the competition. Snap's camera-enabled spectacles, Snap Spectacles, were also a failure. And users hate the Snapchat app's redesign - so much so that sceptical Wall Street analysts last week downgraded Snap's stock.