I'm not here to defend Spiegel, but this sentence kind of reads as a joke based on the amount of "copying Snapchat to put into Instagram" that Facebook spent years doing.
Granted, Spiegel has kept snap some what relevant all these years, but he is not an empire builder, and to be a big player in the social media space you need a leader who is an empire builder.
Snapchat currently has a market cap of $18B. Snapchat has acquired (at least, from my basic google search) 12 different companies.
Your measuring stick here is so extremely off.
I not-so-secretly hope Spiegel sees this, has a laugh, and updates his LinkedIn position to "above average Product Manager @ Snapchat"
Yes, see "Instagram is just to keep up appearances." Still in use but out. As in out of style, not cool, for the parents, etc. Teens are using it to keep the parents at bay for what they are doing on TikTok/Snap.
Instagram was barely anything when Facebook acquired it - there was only an iOS app, barely 27m users and 0 revenue. It was a hugely controversial move to buy it for $1B and there were countless articles about how the acquisition made no sense and how Zuckerberg is making a huge mistake.
It's one of the greatest acquisitions of all time and a masterclass in strategy and execution.
All they've done since they acquired it is CLONE SNAP (aka stories) and add it to IG, and now they're just cloning TikTok because Facebook hasn't ever had an original idea.
They've built an entire monetization engine around it, made a TON of improvements around how media works, added several new formats, built a ton of anti-spam detection/eradication/moderation that works at scale and makes the product actually usable, launched in so many countries with language/accessibility support, and so much more that Instagram couldn't have done as a standalone company.
When Facebook bought Instagram, it was just a speck - it wasn't even a business. It's not even close to the juggernaut it is today.
There's a ton of stuff that goes into scaling products like this. If you want to have a rational conversation about this you have to go deeper than using all caps CLONE. You don't go from 27M to >2B users and from $0 to >$25B in revenue just...randomly.
Instagram seems to still be used by teens, but slowly fizzling out. Tiktok is popular. Snap seems the preferred chat app for most.
As far as I can tell the man has never had an original thought. All he knows how to do is see what some other company is doing and have his team clone it and/or buy it.