Leaked emails from Sony Pictures hack indicate that Snapchat gave 0.11% of its stock to former Apple executive Scott Forstall to be an adviser
Snapchat Is Paying Ex-Apple Exec Scott Forstall 0.11% To Be An Advisor — A leaked email from the Sony Pictures hack indicates Snapchat set aside .11% …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Sony Pictures hack has become an accidental disclosure channel for Snapchat's private dealings: earlier leaks from the same email trove confirmed the company turned down over $3B from Facebook and quietly paid $50M for Scan, $30M for AddLive, and $15M for Vergence Labs (Scan and AddLive, Vergence Labs).
This latest leak adds a governance detail to that picture — a 0.11% equity stake reserved for former Apple executive Scott Forstall as an adviser. It matters because it shows how Snap was spending its cap table while rejecting acquisition offers: buying senior Apple-era product judgment outright rather than selling the company.
First-order effects
- Snapchat's ownership structure now includes a 0.11% allocation to Scott Forstall, meaning any future valuation or funding round implicitly prices in an adviser grant roughly on par with the dollar value of some of its recent acquisitions.
- Forstall gains a meaningful position at one of the most-watched pre-IPO consumer apps, making his involvement public knowledge only because the Sony leak surfaced it — neither company had announced it.
Second-order effects
- Facebook and other acquirers that lost out on the $3B bid now face a Snapchat actively importing Apple product leadership, raising the bar for any renewed approach and pushing rivals to compete for ex-Apple executives themselves.
- Private companies take note that their confidential compensation arrangements can surface through a single breached corporate inbox — a security and disclosure exposure that sits awkwardly alongside Snapchat's recent push toward transparency after cutting off third-party apps.
Third-order effects
- If mega-leaks keep exposing private-company internals this way, pre-IPO firms face pressure to operate as if their boardrooms are public — tightening who holds sensitive email archives and how equity grants are structured.
- The broader pattern points toward late-stage startups using meaningful equity stakes, not just salaries, to recruit big-company veterans as they build toward independence instead of sale — a strategy whose payoff was still unproven when Fidelity later wrote down its Snapchat stake by 25% (Fidelity's writedown).
The trend: Confidential pre-IPO dealmaking is increasingly exposed by large-scale corporate breaches, forcing private companies like Snap to manage disclosure risk even as they spend equity on high-profile hires.