Why Does Wikipedia Think I’m Evan Spiegel?

For sixty weeks for a year, I am 100 percent not the CEO of Snap, the company behind Snapchat. That’s it Evan Spiegelthe company’s billionaire founder. No one in their right mind would doubt that. But for one week a year, especially last week, some people might think I’m the CEO of a media company. If you looked Wikipediait seemed like I was.

Since Sunday, when you clicked on Spiegel’s Wikipedia pagethere was my picture. The same thing happened if you ran a Google Search for Evan Spiegel or asked Google Gemini about him. At the time of publication, that is still the case.

How did this happen? Despite what the internet would have you believe, I am Maxwell Zeff (my friends call me Max). The image on Spiegel’s Wikipedia page was taken from Results TechCrunch meeting last year. I’m a twenty-year-old journalist, and I write about the tech industry for a living, I’ve never met Spiegel and I’ve never written about Snapchat.

But now I’m the CEO—according to Wikipedia. This first came to my attention on Monday, when I was browsing social media and saw a random page “that doesn’t look like Evan Spiegel” with a picture of me on his Wikipedia page. I sat quietly, wondering if I was seeing things. Me they were sent back photo on Twitter and said, “Very interesting but that’s me, not the CEO of Snap.” My followers laughed, responding with comments like “Congrats on the promotion” and “when yacht invitation max.”

The next day, I was still Wikipedia Evan Spiegel. A Snap employee sent a friend a screenshot of Spiegel’s Google search, saying, “Not Max being the second most popular image on Google right now…” A day later, many colleagues, friends, and family members began to notice. One texted me, “Why are you Evan Spiegel?” I didn’t have a good answer. Before I knew it, I spent an entire week as Wikipedia’s Evan Spiegel. I decided to make something else.

On April 26, someone with the name “Artem G” changed Evan Spiegel’s photo to one of mine with the comment “New photo,” according to the site. history. Then, a few days later, someone changed it again, correctly saying: “That’s Maxwell Zeff, not Evan Spiegel.” A few hours later, Artem G jumped in and reverted the change, sending my face back to the Wikipedia page saying, “No, the new image is fine, take it to the talk page if you have to.”

Artem G’s character and dedication impressed me. For the uninitiated, the discussion page is where Wikipedia authors go to resolve disputes. Who was this person who felt so strongly that I should be Wikipedia’s Evan Spiegel and was willing to throw away the discussion page to save me?

I scrolled down a bit and found that Artem G actually tried to Wikipedia Evan Spiegel for me at one point, back in February, but the photo only lasted a few hours. I clicked on Artem G’s contribution page to see what other Wikipedia pages have changed. There were many. He’s donated tons of money to a variety of sites—from Swiss scientists to astronauts to Claude—in the past month.