In mid-September, inside a small theater in Beverly Hills, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel walked on stage in his signature uniform — black t-shirt, jeans and the kind of understated confidence that once made him Silicon Valley’s heir apparent. His newest accessory was hard to miss: a pair of $2,195 Specs, the chunky black smartglasses he’s effectively bet his company on. Unveiled in June to wide mockery for being too bulky and expensive, the glasses became immediate meme fodder. Spiegel, 36, leaned into it. He joked about the helpful “feedback,” thanked the internet for the “pretty funny memes,” and tried to move the conversation past the obvious problem: They look more like PPE for someone fixing a gas leak than a pair of fashionable shades.

Jokes aside, this was the moment Snap needed to prove that Specs were more than an expensive science project with a try-too-hard ad campaign. After more than a decade of work and roughly $3 billion dumped into the effort, the company needed to prove that Spiegel wasn’t just right, but that he could beat out deeper-pocketed rivals. After all, he had seen the future before. Snapchat helped to invent modern social media, more casual and fleeting than Facebook’s middle-aged high school reunion with posts that never seemed to go away. But Snap’s golden days seem long gone, and as the mid-cap company tries to usher in a new age of smartglasses, it’s being outgunned by Meta, Apple, and Google — trillion-dollar companies with seemingly endless reserves of cash — which all have high-tech eyewear devices of their own and the AI chops to back them up.

So the stakes were sky high for the Specs official launch. Things seemed to be going well, but then came a glitch.

While testing the device’s ability to play YouTube videos, Spiegel spoke a voice command for it to pull up videos about the Specs product itself. Nothing happened. “The suspense is killing me,” Spiegel said as he started troubleshooting. “Why is that not clicking? Should we try again here?” he murmured to himself. When the feature finally started working about a minute later, he picked a video and read the title aloud: “AR Smartglasses Are Finally Here. Goodbye Meta Ray-Bans,” leading to hooting laughter and applause from a handpicked, invite-only crowd.

Live demos are always a crapshoot, but the scene seemed a fitting microcosm of Snap: ambitious technology, some genuinely good ideas, questionable execution, and still facing the perennial boogyman that is Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. The history between the two runs deep: Zuckerberg, then the richest twentysomething in history worth some $13 billion or so, offered for Facebook to buy Snap for $3 billion in cash in 2013. Spiegel, then 23, famously turned him down, a decision that was heavily scrutinized. It led to a spree of copycat features soon after: A disappearing message dupe called Poke, a ripoff of Snapchat’s wildly popular Stories, and loads of augmented reality (AR) filters for placing digital graphics over the physical world. The latter two became mainstays of Instagram, and Spiegel jokes on his LinkedIn profile that he’s Meta’s VP of Product.

Now, as Snap goes all in on Specs, Meta still looms large, according to interviews with current and former Snap employees. While developing Specs, staff internally compared the size and thickness of its frames to the rival Meta Ray-Bans. “We were like, ‘This is actually really close,’” one Snap employee says.

To be fair, Specs are a much different product than Meta Ray-Bans, which are normal glasses layered with the tech to record video, play audio and access Meta’s AI assistant. As AR glasses, Specs are more powerful: They can recreate a digital whiteboard over your field of vision so you can brainstorm projects on the go or turn a tabletop into a board game. The chunkier frames are the tradeoff for more robust compute power. (Meta’s own Orion AR prototype glasses, announced in 2024, aren’t out yet.) In fact, while the public makes comparisons to Meta’s device, Snap would rather be seen as playing in a different sandbox — chasing Apple’s $3,700 Vision Pro, more goggles than glasses, with its premium AR features and immersive virtual reality capabilities.

Still, consumers have not only had trouble discerning the difference between Specs and Meta AI glasses, they’ve shown a preference so far for Meta’s cheaper glasses sold under well-known brands like Oakley and Ray-Ban, coming in styles including its iconic Wayfarers. Indeed one of Meta’s biggest strengths in eyewear is its long-term partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the largest eyewear company in the world, which gives it access to massive distribution and dozens of fashion brands. Specs, meanwhile, were designed in-house and Spiegel has said that the company has no plans to partner with outside eyewear or fashion brands. So, aside from the differences in technical abilities, perhaps Meta’s largest advantage over Specs is that people don’t feel stupid being seen out in the streets wearing them — the company has sold more than 7 million pairs so far. Still, Meta’s glasses have faced their own memes, being labeled “pervert glasses” for their ability to surreptitiously record. To combat that image, the company announced an audio-only version at its annual Connect developer conference in September.

After the June unveiling of Specs, the device was persistently panned as being too expensive. The reaction should not have come as a surprise: The company knew the risk, and that consumers preferred it to cost around the price of the Meta Ray-Bans — which sell for around $500 on the high end, or one-fourth of Specs’ cost — according to a person familiar with the project. And while Wall Street would like the company to stop pouring so much money into the project — $500 million annually, according to activist investor Irenic Capital Management — Spiegel wanted to develop deep, more costly tech that is harder to steal, motivated undoubtedly by Meta’s constant pilfering from Snap.

Some observers were kinder about Specs after the September launch, where the company showed off several capabilities, including an AI assistant called Specs Intelligence and a Shopify-powered AR shopping feature. “It’s easy to critique how something looks on the outside but we all know it is about what’s on the inside,” Andreessen Horowitz partner Josh Elman posted on X. “And the inside here is magic.”

Still, others continued to be perplexed after watching the launch. Said one former employee who worked on Specs: “I have no idea who this device is for.” Snap spokesperson Russ Caditz-Peck declined to comment on these specific claims about Specs. He also declined to comment on early presale orders of Specs, set to ship this year but with no specific date.

Meanwhile, Meta, once seen as a laggard in AI, has stirred up genuine excitement among consumers. In early September, it released its personal AI agent Muse, which goes beyond the Meta AI assistant to actually carry out tasks like scheduling meetings or chasing refunds . It’s become a viral hit. A week after the Specs launch event, Zuckerberg helmed Meta’s Connect conference, where he touted how Muse will be folded into the company’s AI glasses to do things like guide personal workouts or help buy products. Meta’s already sky high stock jumped almost 6%.

Investors, by contrast, have not been kind to Snap. Its stock continues to hover around $5, after a post-Covid high of around $80 in 2021 — shrugging off the Specs launch event. The poor stock performance has garnered some unwanted attention. In March, Irenic wrote a scathing open letter to the company demanding layoffs and a jettisoning of the Specs business. A month after Irenic’s letter, Snap laid off around 1,000 people, 16% of its workforce. Irenic did not respond to requests for comment. At least a couple of institutional investors have since retreated. In the second quarter, Fidelity sold off about 25% of its prior holding while BlackRock sold about 7%.

As for the selloff of the smartglasses unit, it has yet to happen. But if it does, it could lift the stock and force focus on the core Snapchat app, still a bright spot for Snap. The company pulled in $1.6 billion in revenue last quarter, up 19% year over year, and Snapchat still has a huge following with 970 million monthly users, more than X’s estimated 560 million.

Still, Spiegel has been steadfast about Specs. Earlier this year, the company set up a subsidiary called Specs Inc. for the teams working on its smartglasses. The team works in its own building at Santa Monica headquarters, cordoned off with special badge access. During the company’s big layoff in April, none of the casualties appeared to be from Specs Inc, three current and former employees said. Some Snap Inc workers, meanwhile, were shifted to Specs Inc. In the days after the June unveiling, Spiegel attempted to reassure the troops during a regularly scheduled town hall called Ask Evan, arguing that the backlash against the product’s size and cost was actually a positive thing, allowing the announcement to reach a wider audience than just the techie and developer community, according to a person who watched the town hall.

The maniacal investment into Specs underscores Spiegel’s iron grip on his company. It’s not uncommon for companies to be cults of personality of their founders. But Spiegel’s DNA is ingrained into Snap at a different level. As other tech companies like Google and Meta ballooned to hundreds of thousands of employees, their founders receded from the trenches. Snap, with only 5,200 people, remains relatively more within the eyeline of Spiegel, who regularly dives into the weeds of feature designs and app updates, according to current and former employees, and his fingerprints are everywhere. The best way to get a project approved is to “speak Evanese,” said one of the former employees.

Once seen as the next Zuckerberg, Spiegel was a young and brash tech titan in the making. When he spurned Zuck’s takeover bid, it positioned the company to build itself into a tech giant to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google. That never happened, despite a modestly successful IPO four years later. Now while Meta and Google reach stratospheric levels in the AI era (with $1.8 trillion and $4.2 trillion market caps, respectively) Snap is worth only $9.4 billion. Once Silicon Valley’s premier wunderkind and world’s youngest self-made billionaire debuting at age 23, Spiegel never took that next step into the realm of tech mogul. And as a new generation of tech leaders, like OpenAI’s Sam Altman or Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, come into major power and influence, Snap has remained stagnant, never evolving past being a scrappy mid-cap. “I think that comparison probably made sense 10 years ago,” one former Snap executive says of likening Spiegel to Zuckerberg. “But as a CEO, Mark is clearly on a different planet at this point.” As one senior banker at a top investment bank tells Forbes they hadn’t thought about Snap in years and do not think Specs will be successful.

S piegel’s backstory is well known. He grew up in tony Pacific Palisades, just east of Malibu, the son of two high-powered lawyers. At Stanford, he and fraternity brother Bobby Murphy, now the company’s CTO, started Picaboo (hence the cheeky ghost mascot), an app for disappearing messages that eventually became Snapchat. His affluent upbringing was in a way a competitive advantage, a former employee says, recalling how a former executive used to say Spiegel embodied a rich teen, so knew how to build products for them. He lost that perspective, the former employee posits, when he got married and had kids. (He has three young sons with his wife, supermodel Miranda Kerr, as well a teenaged stepson from Kerr’s previous marriage to movie star Orlando Bloom.) Caditz-Peck, the Snap spokesperson, rejected the “rich teen” characterization of Spiegel, adding that the company reported a diverse user base from the early days of Snapchat, and notes that currently 80 percent of Snapchat users are over 18.

Still, Spiegel has always considered himself a product maker of refined taste. It’s the reason he set up an elite design team at Snap, seen as being in his inner orbit, a cadre of about 20 employees that work with teams across the company, according to current and former employees. They present projects to Spiegel weekly, and those meetings can play a large role in deciding which projects go into development, two former employees said. One former employee jokes that the CEO treats the team like the Precogs from Minority Report, who possess psychic abilities to see the future. They’ve traveled to annual fancy offsites to gain inspiration, to countries including Japan, India and Italy, former employees say.

Even in his failures, Spiegel has always had an uncanny ability to see the future. In 2017, he travelled to Beijing to visit ByteDance headquarters. Snap had gone public months before, and Spiegel was frustrated with stagnating growth. So, along with an entourage that included then-head of content Nick Bell and then-VP of product Will Wu, he traveled across the globe to learn from the still-under-the-radar Chinese social media company. TikTok had not yet launched. But the idea was to try to bottle the viral magic of its predecessor, the news app Toutiao, people familiar with the trip told Forbes .

“That was really inspiring to me and we made a big change to our product,” Spiegel said of the trip on a podcast last year. That’s an understatement. The company worked feverishly on a dramatic overhaul of the product, known internally as Project Cheetah, which redesigned the app to sort content algorithmically instead of chronologically, just like Toutiao. The results were notoriously disastrous: Celebrities like Kylie Jenner complained and more than a million users signed a petition to change it back. In the end, Spiegel sent a 6,000-word memo to staff apologizing for the misstep. Then he largely reverted the app to the way it was.

The ByteDance trip and its effect on Spiegel illustrate a pitfall that has dogged the Snap founder for most of the company’s history: He was right. TikTok did eventually take over the world. But Snap wasn’t the right company to take up that mantle at the time — for a number of reasons, including poor execution in building buggy software, and prioritizing user content at a time when users weren’t generating enough, according to a former employee who worked on the redesign. Almost a decade later, history may be repeating itself with Specs: He may be right again about the future, but he may not be the one to take us there.

As for Meta, even as Snap keeps it in its sights, Zuckerberg’s company has clearly moved on. Case in point: When Meta agreed to pay a landmark settlement of up to $18 billion for a lawsuit over teenage social media addiction this summer — a case that also involved Snap, TikTok and YouTube — Meta tried to bring its rivals down with it. In a full page ad that ran in national newspapers, Zuckerberg’s company wrote an open letter to its competitors imploring them to join Meta in adding new restrictions for teen users, including a 2-hour daily limit and no notifications during school hours. The letter was only addressed to TikTok and YouTube.

There was no mention of Snap.