For fifty-one weeks other than a year, I am 100 percent not the CEO of Snap, the company behind Snapchat. This is Evan Spiegel, the billionaire co-founder of the company. No one in their right mind would question that. But for one week a year, especially last week, some people might have thought I was the CEO of a social media company. If you looked on Wikipedia, it certainly seemed like it to me.
Starting on Sunday when you click on Spiegel’s Wikipedia pagethere was a picture of me there. The same thing happened if you ran a Google search for Evan Spiegel or asked Google Gemini about him. At the time of publication, this is still the case.
How did it happen? Contrary to what the internet may believe, my name is Maxwell Zeff (my friends call me Max). The photo on Spiegel’s Wikipedia page was taken at TechCrunch conference last year. I’m a reporter in my 20s, and although I cover tech companies for a living, I’ve never met Spiegel and have almost never written about Snapchat.
But now I’m the CEO – according to Wikipedia. I first noticed this on Monday when I was scrolling through social media and saw a random post from an account “that doesn’t look like Evan Spiegel” with a screenshot of my photo on his Wikipedia page. I stopped for a moment, wondering if I was seeing something. AND reposted photo on Twitter and said, “That’s very flattering, but it’s actually me, not the CEO of Snap.” My followers were amused, responding with comments like “Congratulations on your promotion” and “when is the invitation to the yacht maxed out?”
The next day I was still Wikipedia Evan Spiegel. A Snap employee sent a text to a mutual friend containing a screenshot of a Google search for Spiegel, writing: “Max is not the second photo showing up on Google right now…” A day later, more co-workers, friends and family members started to notice. One of them texted me, “Why are you Evan Spiegel?” I didn’t have a good answer. Before I knew it, I had spent an entire week as Wikipedia Evan Spiegel. I decided to investigate.
According to the website, on April 26, a person nicknamed “Artem G” changed Evan Spiegel’s photo to mine with the comment “New photo.” revision history. A few days later, someone changed the name back and correctly stated, “It’s Maxwell Zeff, not Evan Spiegel.” Within a few hours, Artem G jumped back in and reversed the change, returning my face to the Wikipedia page and saying, “No, the new photo is better, take it to the talk page if you must.”
Artem G’s attitude and dedication piqued my interest. For the uninitiated, the talk page is where Wikipedia editors go to settle disputes. Who was this person who adamantly believed I should be Wikipedia’s Evan Spiegel and was willing to throw me onto the talk page to keep me there?
I scrolled down a little further and discovered that Artem G actually tried to make me look like Wikipedian Evan Spiegel another time in February, but the photo only stayed up for a few hours. I clicked on Artem G’s entry page to see what other Wikipedia pages he had made changes to. There were plenty of them. In the last month alone, he has posted hundreds of entries on sites ranging from Swiss Scientists to Space Artifacts to Claude.