If Elon Musk had wanted to buy Snap instead of Twitter, it wouldn't have been so easy for him.

Twitter was vulnerable to a takeover simply because of its shareholder structure.

All shares of the Internet company have the same voting rights and nobody exercises a controlling influence.

This is different with some competitors.

The most well-known example is the Facebook parent company Meta, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds privileged shares and therefore controls a majority of the voting rights.

Roland Lindner

Business correspondent in New York.

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Snap is even more extreme in a way.

The parent company of the social network Snapchat issued shares without any voting rights to other investors when it went public in 2017.

The two co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy have special shares that give them 99 percent of the voting rights.

So it would hardly be possible to take over Snap against their will.

That was even in the prospectus as a risk factor.

Critics say such constructions are not compatible with good corporate governance, i.e. the principles of corporate management.

Bobby Murphy counters that the stock structure is in line with Snap.

"We want to make sure that we can pursue a long-term vision," he says in an interview with the FAZ. Snaps' horizons reach far into the future, for example with "augmented reality", i.e. technologies for enriching the real world with digital elements.

Murphy says the stock structure gives him and his co-founder the freedom to take this work forward.

Spiegel and he are with "extreme passion" in the matter.

Murphy is Snap's Chief Technology Officer and Spiegel is its CEO.

Metaverse hardly an issue

Snap has 332 million users, more than Twitter.

With almost two billion users, Facebook is far ahead and also outshines Snap in public perception.

Facebook once even wanted to buy Snap, but was turned down.

Despite its large deficit, Snap has maintained its position as one of Meta's few serious American rivals.

The company is also considered to be highly innovative, Meta copied functions from it.

In terms of strategy and positions, it often clearly distinguishes itself from larger competitors.

For example, Snap rarely speaks of the metaverse, which plays a large role in Zuckerberg's vision of the future and by which he means virtual spaces in which the boundaries to reality become blurred.

Both augmented reality and virtual reality will be used.

For the latter, special computer glasses are used that allow complete immersion in virtual worlds, for example in video games.

Snap, on the other hand, focuses largely on augmented reality, which Murphy calls "a whole different direction".

Snap also strikes a very different note than Meta when it comes to Apple's controversial new data rules.

This is an obstacle to the collection of user data on Apple devices and makes it difficult for operators of apps like Snapchat or Facebook to tailor advertising to individual users.

Meta therefore expects sales to drop by ten billion dollars this year, and Snap has also admitted that business is suffering as a result.

But while Facebook has been vocal about Apple's new policy, Snap, even if it costs money at the moment, embraces it.

Murphy says his company is "philosophically aligned" with Apple when it comes to privacy.

"We have always believed that thinking and acting in the interest of our users is best for our business in the long run."

Joke effects important part of the app

From the start, Snapchat was something of an alternative to Facebook.

The core idea of ​​the service, which was created a little over ten years ago, was to make the photos and videos exchanged there disappear again after a short time.

So it shouldn't be about documenting life like on Facebook.

First the deletion mechanism kicked in after just a few seconds, but over time other options were added, such as a "story" function that allows content to be visible for 24 hours.

The Snapchat concept initially met with some suspicion, with some believing it was a gimmick or a way to primarily exchange raunchyness.

But it soon became apparent that Snapchat had found a gap in the market and there was a need for such a more ephemeral way of communicating.