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https://www.wsj.com/articles/miranda-kerr-evan-spiegel-at-home-photos-pro ile-11594729523
FEATURE Miranda Kerr and Evan Spiegel: A Marriage of Mindfulness The Snapchat co-founder and supermodel are a study in contrasts. As Snap faces its own diversity challenges, the couple are on a mission to address social ills and racial injustice—including holding President Trump accountable for inflammatory remarks.
By Christina Binkley July 14, 2020 8 29 am ET
When Evan Spiegel and Miranda Kerr met for a first date, at a kundalini class at Golden Bridge Yoga in Los Angeles, Spiegel arrived early and sat at the front of the studio. Kerr walked in late (45 minutes late, Spiegel says) and took a place at the back, where she giggled out of nervous habit. “When I was a child, my mom called me Giggling Gert,” she says.
TIES THAT BIND The couple were married in 2017. When they irst got serious, Spiegel told Kerr, “[Snap] is like the center of my life. If that’s a deal-breaker for you, I totally get it.” On Kerr: Chloé top, $1,895, Chloé boutiques and her own earrings. On Spiegel: Dior Men T-shirt, $550, dior.com. PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL JACK LYONS FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE, STYLING BY JESSICA PASTER
The relationship between the co-founder of Snap Inc. and the supermodel has never been a typical billionaire-meets-model nerd-fantasy pairing. He is seven years her junior. “But who’s counting?” says Spiegel, who turned 30 in June. When they met in 2014, he was an unattached college dropout; she was a single mother. Spiegel is obsessively punctual; Kerr is habitually late. He loves junk food; she is the founder of Kora Organics, a skin-care line. “He goes straight for the coffee machine,” Kerr says. “I go straight for my lemon water.”
Given Kerr’s fame as a Victoria’s Secret model and Spiegel’s broad impact on global youth communications, their influence as a celebrity couple ranges from fashion and lifestyle to politics and norms of civic discourse. Spiegel recently came into President Trump’s crosshairs after taking a position in the debate over how social media platforms handle inflammatory speech. Kerr has planted her stake in the field of wellness. It was Kerr who warned Spiegel in January that the coronavirus was “going to be a global catastrophe,” he says, and went online to buy safety gear for their family including a Tyvek hazmat suit for her immunocompromised mother.
Snapchat has been a cornerstone of their relationship ever since they traded photos using the app’s heart-eyes filter back when that now-famous lens was first being tested. When they got serious, Spiegel told Kerr, “[Snap] is like the center of my life. If that’s a deal- breaker for you, I totally get it.” He recognized that the center of Kerr’s life was Flynn, her son with her ex-husband, the actor Orlando Bloom. On that first date, he presented her with a gingerbread house he’d made, icing it with her and Flynn’s names.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, Spiegel was accustomed to rising at 5:30 a.m. and arriving at the office before most Angelenos were sitting down for their first latte. Kerr fed the kids breakfast before going to work—either at Kora’s West L.A. offices or, increasingly since she and Spiegel started a family, at home—until school let out. She spent late afternoons with their three children (Flynn, 9; Hart, 2; and Myles, 9 months), then put the little ones to bed. She and Spiegel dined later, if he wasn’t jetting off somewhere, logging some of the 600 hours he spends in the air annually.
In mid-March, Covid-19 restrictions sent Spiegel into an improvised home office in their three-bedroom Brentwood house, with the magnolia tree out back under which they were married before 30 guests in 2017. Six weeks in, Spiegel declared he didn’t want to return to the office.
“I told our team I’m not coming back,” says Spiegel, half joking. “The thing that’s been so profound for me, I’m actually a part of our family now.” OPPOSITES ATTRACT Evan Spiegel, co-founder of Snap, and model and entrepreneur Miranda Kerr, photographed at their home in Los Angeles. On Spiegel: Dior Men T-shirt, $550, and jeans, $650, dior.com (worn throughout). On Kerr: Etro top, $1,320, and culottes, $1,550, etro.com, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello belt, $625, ysl.com, and her own jewelry (worn throughout). PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL JACK LYONS FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE, STYLING BY JESSICA PASTER
During one of our remote interviews (in light of the pandemic, Spiegel and Kerr agreed to a series of Zoom, Google Meet and FaceTime conversations), Spiegel describes the newfound joys of sharing a breakfast and dinner table with Miranda and the kids. (Kerr, an avid cook, sometimes brings him meals at his desk.) “She never made me feel bad for working hard, so I didn’t have that stress of letting anyone down. But I was letting myself down,” he says. “My dad worked all the time when I was growing up. It was wearing on my mom. My parents ended up splitting up.” Whether or not Spiegel ever returns full time to Snap’s loosely configured campus in a Santa Monica office park, the dramas of 2020 have impacted the direction he’s taking the company. Take the sudden surge in videoconferencing (Spiegel uses Google Meet more than Zoom). “Bear in mind, no one has had a chance to innovate on this yet. None of the tools [we’re using] right now have been designed for this environment,” he says.
In the weeks leading up to the Snap Partner Summit—an annual announcement of its new initiatives, held this year on June 11—Spiegel struggled with how to address the Black Lives Matter protests reverberating around the world. He’d long worried that social media has the potential to inflame already explosive events, as has been the case with Facebook and Twitter.
“I’m a huge news consumer,” he says, noting he was the design editor of his high school newspaper. “I think it’s a pretty important accountability mechanism.” He’s been subjected to such scrutiny himself, from news reports about the acrimonious divorce of his high-profile-lawyer parents to decisions he’s made as Snap’s CEO: “[It] can be painful at times, as I learned growing up, going from my parents holding me accountable to journalists holding me accountable.”
When he read tweets in which President Trump responded to protests with “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” Spiegel decided to stop promoting Trump’s Snapchat account in the Discover section, which users can explore, meaning the platform would no longer help the president reach a broader audience. Prior to that, Trump’s Snapchat account was among those regularly highlighted in Discover.
Trump’s campaign responded by posting on Snapchat that the platform was trying “to rig the 2020 election” and referring to “radical Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel.”
“It’s obviously untrue,” Spiegel says of the vote-rigging allegations. “That’s the rhetoric they use when they’re upset.”
One Sunday afternoon at the end of May, as videos of protests and police beatings surfaced around the nation, Spiegel penned a “Dear Team” letter to employees. “Every minute we are silent in the face of evil and wrongdoing we are acting in support of evildoers,” he wrote. “I am heartbroken and enraged by the treatment of Black people and people of color in America.” The 2,373-word treatise, which in parts reads like a political speech, is perhaps the most revealing statement that Spiegel, typically reticent in public, has ever issued. He addressed the “rotten foundation” of the U.S., built as it was on slave ownership. He included a chart he’d devised earlier in which he illustrated how little of the federal budget addresses the welfare of future generations. He called out the shortcomings of gross domestic product as a measure of true success; made a case to establish a governmental Commission on Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations; and argued that the U.S. must spend more on education, health care and housing.
He also noted that the boomer generation has underinvested in the future while holding on to a majority of all household wealth in the U.S. “To put it in context, billionaires hold about 3 percent,” he wrote, without mentioning that there are roughly 73 million U.S. baby boomers, compared to 614 billionaires on Forbes’ annual list, of which he is one, with a net worth estimated at $4.1 billion, most of it in Snap Inc. stock.
GAME CHANGER Spiegel (seen here in the couple’s back yard with their dog, Teddy) has been working from home since mid-March. “I told our team I’m not coming back,” he says, half joking. “I’m actually part of our family now.” PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL JACK LYONS FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE, STYLING BY JESSICA PASTER “As for Snapchat,” Spiegel continued, shooting the dart that targeted Trump, “we simply cannot promote accounts in America that are linked to people who incite racial violence, whether they do so on or off our platform.”
Spiegel’s note never mentioned Trump by name. Days later, he tells me he sees it as a First Amendment issue. “We’re a business and we can put what we want on our platform,” he says.
Kerr says she read parts of the letter as he was writing it. “He wanted to articulate it in a way that would be very clear,” she says, but what he shared wasn’t new to her. “He’s my husband. I understand where his heart is.”
Snapchat became mired in a new controversy in June. A racially diverse team—including a small contingent of Black employees who are part of a group known as SnapNoir, as well as members of the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion group—collaborated on a plan to recognize Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the emancipation of slaves. The Snapchat lens they created allowed users to break a set of animated chains with a smile. When it was released on June 19, the filter created a furor among users who said it lacked sensitivity. Spiegel struggled with how to address the issue without undermining his own employees. “Our team tried to do the right thing by commemorating Juneteenth, and while many of our efforts resonated with our community, a Lens that we released clearly did not. What began with the best of intentions ended with a reminder of how much work is left to do and overshadowed our broader efforts to educate our community about the legacy of slavery in America and [to] create a society that lives up to our values,” Spiegel wrote in an email to me that evening.
The incident highlighted another issue at Snap: Spiegel has resisted making the company’s diversity employment figures public. While Snap’s 10-member board includes one Black member and four women, its overall employee base is far more white and male, according to a person familiar with the company, who went on to note that this reflects a lack of diversity in the tech industry as a whole. Spiegel says he’ll release the company’s employment data this summer along with some ideas for how to improve diversity.
Spiegel and co-founder Bobby Murphy don’t consider Snapchat to be social media. Rather than promoting broad engagement, they say, the platform was designed to cement friendships, one by one, without the competitive metrics of likes and follower counts used by many other social media apps. “Social media is a game,” Spiegel says. “Playing that game is really different from building a relationship with our friends.” He says he once had a Facebook account that he deleted during college and that he “lurks” on Twitter. His Twitter account shows he’s tweeted 31 times and follows 37 accounts, including Bill Gates, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, life guru/former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson and Saudi royal billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, who in 2018 bought a 2.3 percent stake in Snap.
Snapchat, with posts that disappear after 24 hours, is a friendlier, less incendiary place than Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. A Snapchat user opens the app directly into the camera—to encourage unrehearsed creativity—and sends it only to their friends list. This has contributed to its lack of popularity among people over 35. If you don’t already have lots of friends on Snapchat, it can be a very lonely place, with only the Discover page providing content.
Anyone who hopes to reach Snapchat’s 229 million youthful daily users—who generally range from 13 to 34 years old, with a median age that Snap won’t disclose—often adopts a softer tone than on other platforms. While Trump’s Twitter feed this spring was calling Black Lives Matter protesters “lowlifes and losers” and demanding that local officials call up the National Guard, his Snapchat stream was on some days a Kumbaya collage of heart-tugging images: law enforcement officials hugging protesters, protesters guarding police officers, Black Americans weeping.
The heavy Instagram user in the Spiegel-Kerr family is Kerr, with 12.3 million followers. (Her Twitter account consists almost entirely of messages forwarded from her Instagram feed and automatically reposted and shared to her 5.1 million followers.) She holds a live weekly Wellness Wednesday chat on Instagram with guests such as Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa, the co-founder and a director of Golden Bridge Yoga, or the model Jasmine Tookes. As protests burgeoned in June, Kerr invited Michael Tubbs, the Black mayor of Stockton, California, who is also a rising star in the Democratic party. Kerr noted to Tubbs that as a white woman she has not experienced systemic racism. “However,” she said, “I do have a heart and I completely empathize.” They discussed how white people can help— by calling out racism and contributing to causes, Tubbs suggested.
BALANCING ACT Spiegel (checking his phone in the family room) says Kerr “never made me feel bad for working hard, so I didn’t have that stress of letting anyone down. But I was letting myself down.” PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL JACK LYONS FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE, STYLING BY JESSICA PASTER
Tubbs and Spiegel are close friends from Stanford. They met while studying abroad in South Africa, where they “just clicked,” Tubbs said in an interview that took place on May 22, before the killing of George Floyd triggered protests. Tubbs, who was raised in economically depressed Stockton, describes Spiegel as “this white frat boy from the Palisades.” Even so, Tubbs says, “he was fearless in the way I was fearless, in terms of new experiences.” On a field trip to Johannesburg, their group was told they would not stop in the Black township of Soweto. “I was like, I’m not going to Johannesburg and not going to Soweto,” Tubbs says. “We made the bus pull over and we got off and walked the streets of Soweto, meeting people.” Spiegel dragged Tubbs places too. “He had me go to some electronica concert,” Tubbs says.
Spiegel, as a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity, had a campus reputation as a highly social frat boy, but back at Stanford, he moved with Tubbs into Ujamaa House, a predominantly Black dorm where residents discussed the kind of society they wished to live in and how to give back. Tubbs and Spiegel lived across the hall from each other as they got early starts on their postcollegiate careers. “While I was campaigning for city council, he was building Snap,” Tubbs says. In 2018 Spiegel and Kerr, through their Spiegel Family Fund, gave $20 million to establish Tubbs’s Stockton Scholars, a citywide scholarship initiative aimed at helping underprivileged students to enroll in and graduate from college. As a child, Kerr was not as privileged as Spiegel, who attended an elite private school in Santa Monica, the Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, and drove a BMW between his divorced parents’ homes. Kerr’s mother, an accountant and entrepreneur, was 17 when Miranda was born; Kerr grew up riding motorbikes and horses in Gunnedah, New South Wales, in Australia. “My dad is the only boyfriend my mother has ever had,” says Kerr, who frequently quotes her mother, sometimes under her breath as though reminding herself: “My mum always says, If you’re going to do something, do it right or don’t do it at all.” Her father, she says, is the family “teddy bear” and the parent she most takes after. He used to run a building company and now takes care of his mother and father, Kerr says.
Her early modeling career was a part-time juggle with high school, with Kerr attending photo shoots during vacations and holidays, always with one of her parents chaperoning. After graduation, she began to travel for work—flying economy to and from Australia. “We worked long hours, but I saw my parents with their own businesses, working long hours,” she says. “I thought that’s what everyone did.”
Even as a Victoria’s Secret model, she says, she didn’t find herself ensnared by the modeling industry’s #MeToo issues, possibly because she was an adult by the time she went on shoots alone. “I’m not sure if it was who I was, but I never found myself in those situations, where I felt threatened,” Kerr says. She does recall a shoot where “girls were acting crazy and the photographer was encouraging it,” but she says she felt no pressure to participate. “I didn’t want to.” FAMILY MATTERS Kerr grew up in Gunnedah, New South Wales, in Australia. “My dad is the only boyfriend my mother has ever had,” she says. “My mum always says, If you’re going to do something, do it right or don’t do it at all.” Michael Kors Collection dress, $2,350, michaelkors.com. PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL JACK LYONS FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE, STYLING BY JESSICA PASTER
Kerr never attended college. For Spiegel, though he dropped out and returned later to complete his degree in 2018, Stanford occupies a special place in his life, as the setting where he and Bobby Murphy launched Snapchat in 2011. Today, the co-founders have carefully divided responsibilities that leave the public-facing duties to Spiegel. “I don’t enjoy the spotlight,” Murphy says.
Murphy is responsible for the platform’s technical development and especially its use of augmented reality—via lenses that can distort a user’s face by aging it or embellishing it with bunny ears—a feature that has been copied by Facebook and Instagram. At the office, he says he and Spiegel have desks located “within a soft shout of one another.” During coronavirus sheltering, they’ve met for a long walk in a Santa Monica park, continuing a tradition they began in Snap’s early days. Snap’s location in West L.A. is arguably one of the reasons the platform functions differently from its Silicon Valley–based peers—a reflection of its co-founders, who are wary of tech cliques. “Evan wanted to go back to L.A.,” says Murphy, who grew up in the Bay Area. Their second headquarters in Venice Beach added character. “We had this idea that being out on the beach and the boardwalk, being able to walk outside and see lots of people, it spurs more creativity and gives you a sense of who’s out there, [more than] the Bay Area, where there’s such a saturation of technology companies,” Murphy says.
Several years ago, when Kerr was doing more commercial fashion shoots, Spiegel asked her why she was spending her considerable image capital promoting other people’s brands. Why not use it to promote and expand Kora, which was then little known outside of Australia? She shifted gears. Kora is now sold internationally through retail outlets including Sephora, and Kerr now spends most of her professional time focused on the brand. She also designs a homeware line called Miranda Kerr Home with Universal Furniture.
Kerr and Spiegel met at a party hosted by Louis Vuitton at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, six years ago this autumn. The French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel invited Spiegel, who had no date. Niel turned to his life partner, Delphine Arnault, a 45-year-old Louis Vuitton executive and scion of the family that controls LVMH. She was more than happy to find Spiegel a seatmate for the evening.
Arnault had met Spiegel months before when Niel told her that the young tech founder, in Paris at the time, had asked to meet for a spur-of-the-moment drink at 11:30 p.m. at the Raspoutine nightclub.
“You were mad,” Niel tells Arnault during our joint phone interview.
“I didn’t want to go,” agrees Arnault, who thought her younger brothers might be more age-appropriate for a meetup with Spiegel and tried fruitlessly to get them to go instead.
“I wanted Delphine to come because—two men!” Niel says.
“He was afraid they wouldn’t get in,” interjects Arnault. Agreeing to join the outing, she turned out to be delighted by Spiegel, who speaks French. They stayed up talking until 3 a.m.
As she perused the roster of luminaries invited to the MoMA party, Arnault selected Kerr to sit next to Spiegel. “I thought, She is very beautiful; I’m sure he will have a good time.” FULL SWING Kerr has a harmonious co-parenting relationship with her ex, Orlando Bloom, and an open-door policy for their son Flynn’s friends and their parents. “That’s one of the things I love about Miranda,” Spiegel says. “Everyone is welcome. It’s the Aussie way.” Jonathan Simkhai dress, $495, net-a-porter.com. PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL JACK LYONS FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE, STYLING BY JESSICA PASTER
Kerr had a great time. She told Spiegel her favorite piece of classical music was “Spiegel im Spiegel,” a plaintive ballad by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. He hadn’t heard it. Kerr got Spiegel’s cellphone number. Glenda Bailey, at the time the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, leaned over from Kerr’s other side and whispered, “You’re going to marry that guy.”
And then, before dinner was over, Spiegel left abruptly. “All of a sudden he gets up,” Kerr says.
“I thought I had no chance [with Miranda], so I wasn’t going to waste my time,” Spiegel says. A month later, emboldened by several glasses of sake after a fashion shoot in Tokyo, Kerr sent him a text message. “Just wondering—did you ever listen to that song, ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’?” she asked. “He was really surprised that she was interested,” says Murphy. “He was over the moon. She’s the first supermodel he dated.”
Kerr says things developed so slowly that she thought Spiegel just wanted to be friends. Their first kiss came weeks after the yoga class when he dropped off a Christmas gift while her parents were visiting. She answered the door in navy blue pajamas. “It was all very slow, a respectful kiss goodbye,” she says. Later, Spiegel playfully flew circles over her Malibu house to offer an airborne greeting during a helicopter flight.
Soon Spiegel was introducing Kerr to his circle of friends, including Snap Inc. chairman Michael Lynton and his wife, Jamie Alter, early investors in the company. When Spiegel brought Kerr to meet them in Los Angeles—Lynton and Alter were visiting after just moving back to New York—Kerr arrived carrying dinner. “Miranda came over with a full meal because we had no food. She brought her casserole dish. She’s an amazing cook,” says Alter, who has attempted unsuccessfully to invest in Kora.
Kerr says she isn’t interested in taking on outside investors. She owns 95 percent of Kora, alongside a 5 percent investor, Shannon Rivkin, an Australian businessman who helped her get started. Kora has been profitable for two years, she says, but she won’t divulge revenues.
The concept behind Kora dates back to when Kerr was still a teenager. After her mother underwent surgery to have her spleen removed, the family researched food safety, especially how to avoid chemical additives. Kerr later studied nutrition at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, telling her father that modeling seemed like a short-lived career. “I’d go to these castings. You get one job, and then you don’t get a slew of jobs,” she says. “It’s not a good feeling.”
Kora was born (Kerr jokes she has three sons and one daughter, Kora) when Kerr complained to a friend that she couldn’t find certified-organic skin-care products, which she’d read contain ingredients with higher levels of antioxidants. As she developed products, she turned to the extract of the noni fruit, a plant indigenous to Southeast Asia and Australia that her grandmother had used to treat everything from pimples to lethargy. Kora now applies rose quartz crystals to various product formulas, including a filtration process that has no scientific basis but about which Kerr says, “Maybe it won’t work for everyone. I wanted something that added a little magic to your day.” During one of my final conversations with Spiegel and Kerr, the couple sat on a couch with Flynn between them while Kerr breastfed Myles, moving the baby from one side to the other in the relaxed manner of an experienced mother. She said the most recent snap she’d sent was of Hart, who that morning had been driving a little white toy Jeep on their Brentwood cul-de-sac. “My latest snap was chicken wings for lunch,” Spiegel said. Kerr’s lunch that day consisted of asparagus soup and a potato salad she’d cooked using recipes from Cleanse to Heal, a book by the controversial wellness figure Anthony William on which she’s currently basing many of her meals.
Our conversation highlighted some of their differences as a couple. Spiegel, the child of divorce, says he has learned from Kerr’s harmonious relationship with Orlando Bloom, her ex, as the three of them raise Flynn. They have an open-door policy for Flynn’s friends and their parents.
SIDE BY SIDE “We do see the world very di erently,” Spiegel says, “and that’s, in my view, a huge strength.” On Kerr: Etro top, $1,320, and culottes, $1,550, etro.com, and Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello belt, $625, ysl.com. Hair and makeup, Ericka Verrett; manicure, Olivia de Montagnac. PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL JACK LYONS FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE, STYLING BY JESSICA PASTER “This is one of the things I love about Miranda,” Spiegel says. “Everyone is welcome. It’s the Aussie way.” That includes Bloom. “What I saw from Miranda and Orlando was very different from what I experienced,” Spiegel says. “I am in no way a replacement for Flynn’s dad. I feel like [I’m part of] Team Flynn.”
During the coronavirus lockdown, the open-door policy for Flynn and his friends has migrated online. Like parents everywhere, Spiegel and Kerr have relaxed some of their concerns about monitoring their children’s use of technology. “His screen-time restrictions are out the window,” Spiegel says. Kerr doesn’t quite agree. (“We do limit screen time around here,” she says later.)
Spiegel, sitting on the couch and holding Kerr’s hand, pokes fun at her habitual tardiness and mentions that first date, when he thought he would have to do the yoga class alone because she was so late.
“It was not 45 minutes late,” she interjects.
“OK, we do see the world very differently, and that’s, in my view, a huge strength,” Spiegel says a few minutes later. “There’s nothing more helpful than having someone who loves you, and knows you really well, point out a different perspective,” he adds, as Kerr glances over at him and wipes a tear from her eye. •
Copyright © 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit https://www.djreprints.com.