Snap’s Evan Spiegel joins MacKenzie Scott in the billionaire race to erase medical debt—wiping out $550 million for 260,000 Californians

Evan Spiegel has never been the loudest billionaire in the room. Sometime this spring, the Snap co-founder and his wife, supermodel and KORA Organics CEO Miranda Kerr, quietly made a multimillion-dollar donation to a nonprofit called Undue Medical Debt. The Los Angeles Times reported that in doing so, set in motion the erasure of $550 million in unpaid medical bills for more than 261,000 Californians. The move places Spiegel alongside Mac Kenzie Scott as one of the most significant individual donors to the medical debt relief movement—a fast-growing philanthropic trend that has found a peculiar but powerful arbitrage at the intersection of distressed debt markets and American healthcare dysfunction. Starting in mid-July, Californians will begin receiving letters informing them that their medical debt has been erased. Recipients are automatically eligible if they earn at or below 400% of the federal poverty level, or if their medical debt exceeds 5% of their annual income. San Diego County will see the largest share of relief—roughly $99 million for approximately 40,000 residents. Los Angeles County will receive $26.7 million in relief for around 17,500. “The scale of this gift to Californians is truly astonishing, unburdening over a quarter million families of over half a billion dollars of un-payable medical debt,” said Undue Medical Debt president and CEO Allison Sesso. With one in four U.S. adults having medical debt, she called it a “growing crisis undermining healthcare access, economic wellbeing and mental health.” Nobody should go bankrupt because of a cancer diagnosis and no family should have to choose between insulin and groceries, she argued, while thanking Evan and Miranda for sharing in that belief. A playbook MacKenzie Scott helped write The model Spiegel used was pioneered at scale by Scott, the Amazon founder’s ex-wife who has become the most prolific philanthropist of her generation. Scott gave Undue Medical Debt—then known as RIP M