Snapchat's CEO Gave Us The Email He Sent To Mark Zuckerberg

Lately, the press hasn't been kind to Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel.

He's been portrayed as a brute who screwed over a former friend to found Snapchat. There's a profile that paints him as a stuck-up brat. And people are angry he hasn't apologized to the 4.6 million users whose accounts were hacked on Snapchat.

Today, Forbes has a feature article on Snapchat and the intro plays right into Spiegel's negative profile:

According to Forbes, Mark Zuckerberg emailed Evan Spiegel to speak, and Spiegel gave a disrespectful response:

"Mark Zuckerberg, the richest twenty something in history, reached out to Snapchat's Evan Spiegel…with an invitation, delivered to his personal email account: Come to Menlo Park and Let's get to know each other. Spiegel…responded to his role model thusly: I'm happy to meet you… if you come to me."

Spiegel's response sounds arrogant. What no-name startup founder tells a CEO worth $20 billion to fly to him?

Except the story is wrong. That wasn't Spiegel's response to Mark Zuckerberg, at least according to Spiegel who sent us a screenshot of the email thread.

Instead, he wrote that he'd be happy to meet Zuckerberg, and he'd let him know the next time he was in the Bay Area.

Here's a screengrab from Spiegel of the conversation, from November 28, 2012, which sounds completely reasonable:

We're emailing Forbes to figure out where the disconnect happened. Presumably, Zuckerberg decided to fly to Spiegel on his own accord; Spiegel didn't demand his presence in Los Angeles. Forbes says Zuckerberg ultimately traveled to Los Angeles to meet with Spiegel there. A few weeks later Facebook's Snapchat-like app, Poke, was launched.