How Much Money Did The Winklevoss Twins Get From Facebook

Everything You've Read Near Harvard'southward Winklevoss Twins Is Wrong

With a new book out this calendar month, the author of Facebook'south origin story reconsiders the villains he helped create.

Tech gurus Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss. / Getty Images

I've e'er believed that if the Winklevoss twins didn't exist in real life, Hollywood would have invented them.

As portrayed nearly a decade ago in The Social Network, the movie adjusted from my 2009 volume The Accidental Billionaires, the higher-age pair cutting quite a celluloid spectacle: chiseled, privileged, painfully blond 6-pes-v identical-twin Olympic rowers—the perfect foils to the über-nerdy, socially bad-mannered Mark Zuckerberg, defenseless upwardly in the Shakespearian drama at the middle of the founding of Facebook, the social network that grew from a college experiment to a company that now dominates much of our lives.

In my—and Aaron Sorkin's, and David Fincher'southward—telling, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss were the ultimate big men on campus: the absurd kids at Harvard, jocks who showed upward for classes wearing suits and ties, children of a cocky-made tycoon who were members of the Porcellian, the poshest of all the university's semi-secret, all-male person final clubs. Pitted against them, outset in a dining hall at Kirkland House on the Harvard campus and and then, somewhen, in a mediation bedchamber surrounded by lawyers, Zuckerberg was their polar reverse—a rebellious calculator geek trying to disrupt the social order for what he perceived to exist the greater good.

But now, 10 years later, that dynamic has suddenly reversed. Today, Zuckerberg is no longer the revolutionary; Facebook, the visitor that grew out of his dorm room, is now one of the most powerful businesses on earth. It is the institution, 1 of the silos controlling much of the data that flows through the Net. Zuckerberg—defenseless up in scandal after scandal involving everything from his platform misusing private data to helping spread political disinformation—seems more than James Bail villain than plucky, awkward hero.

And even more surprising, the twins are also back in the news. In an unlikely 2d deed, these quondam emblems of the establishment have of a sudden been recast as revolutionaries, conveying the flag for a disruptive new technology that might one day overshadow Zuckerberg's creation itself. For the past twelvemonth and a half, I've been documenting the Winklevoss twins' wild ride into the brand-new world of cryptocurrencies. And the irony is not lost on me that the effect of this enquiry, and my new book, Bitcoin Billionaires, is really a reassessment of the image of the twins that I was partially responsible for creating. Information technology'due south like shooting fish in a barrel to judge the brothers by how they look, how they dress, and where they come up from. I grew up on '80s archetypes, and I am now fully enlightened that there's often a fine line betwixt vivid, real-life characters—and caricatures.

The Winklevoss twins are the discipline of Ben Mezrich's new book, Bitcoin Billionaires. / Getty Images

My journeying to Bitcoin Billionaires began more 11 years ago, with a foreign little electronic mail sent to my website in February 2008. Because of the success of my book Bringing Downwardly the House, and the resulting motion picture, 21, I was used to getting emails from college kids describing diverse schemes and adventures that usually ended in fortunes (or jail time). Merely this particular e-mail struck me as dissimilar. It was from a Harvard educatee named Will McMullen, and to paraphrase, information technology basically said: My best friend founded Facebook, and nobody has e'er heard of him.

In 2008, I was aware of Facebook. At the time, it wasn't the megalith that it is today, simply a fair number of my friends were using the social network on a daily footing. I had heard of someone named Marker Zuckerberg, the founder, but I wasn't aware that anyone else might have been involved. Curious, I arranged to run across the subject of the email the next night at Bar x at the Westin in the Back Bay.

When Eduardo Saverin walked into Bar 10, he looked a little like a dog that had been kicked a few times. Despondent but not yet desperate, he started the chat abruptly: "Marking Zuckerberg fucked me."

From there, he proceeded to tell me the crazy story at the eye of what would eventually become The Social Network. A tale of two best friends who were far from social stars, more comfortable in front of their computer screens, and pathetically challenged when information technology came to matters of the opposite sex. Saverin, from a wealthy Brazilian family, hoped to become a member of 1 of Harvard's secretive final clubs to jump-commencement his social life. Zuckerberg, his all-time friend, decided on a much more than inventive strategy. Hacking his way to photos of female person classmates across campus, he created a website called Facemash where students could vote on which classmate was "hotter." When the link he sent to a few friends leaked all over the school, it nearly crashed the network—and led to Zuckerberg being pulled in front of the administrative board and almost getting expelled.

Enter: the Winklevoss twins. When Zuckerberg's troubles (his very first scandal, it could be argued) were written upwards in the Harvard Reddish, he caught the attention of Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who happened to be working on their own website with their roommate Divya Narendra in their dorm room in Pforzheimer House on the Quad. Called the HarvardConnection—and subsequently renamed ConnectU—their project was a dating website/social network aimed at connecting students through shared interests. Their own programmer had left campus to work for Google, and so they were in need of someone with the necessary computer skills to complete their nearly finished coding. In brusk, they needed a geek. From what they'd read in the Crimson, Zuckerberg more than fit the bill.

Subsequently a dejeuner coming together at Kirkland Firm, Zuckerberg agreed to assistance—nigh likely more intrigued by the chance to hang out with 2 Olympic-level athletes with enviable social pedigrees than by their computer code—only then began to accident them off, generally via email. At the same time, Zuckerberg went dorsum to his friend Saverin with a proposal: He had an thought for a website where people would put their ain profiles up to connect with 1 another—and nobody would end up getting expelled from school. All Saverin needed to do was put up some money, and Zuckerberg would practise the rest.

A few weeks later, behind the Winklevoss twins' backs, Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com, and the remainder was history. Somewhen, he kicked Saverin to the curb, resulting in a lawsuit, a confidential settlement, and my volume and movie. Similarly, the twins—feeling betrayed—sued also, and received a hefty settlement of their own.

This moment—what I believed at the time to be the end of the twins' story—was actually but the kickoff.

Ironically, I first made contact with Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss past reaching out to them via Facebook. A week after that evening at Bar 10 with Saverin, we bundled a face up-to-face coming together in New York, at the W Hotel in Spousal relationship Foursquare. When the twins walked into my suite, one of my very beginning thoughts eventually ended up in the book: They looked only like the bad guys in every '80s movie I had grown up on. On appearance alone, they were the matinee-idol dudes in the skeleton costumes chasing the karate child around the gym.

More than that, they were incredibly compelling because there were two of them. Not just identical—but mirror twins, an even stranger twist of biology. Ordinarily, identical twins—born of a single egg fertilized by a single sperm—separate into unique embryos betwixt the second and eighth twenty-four hours of gestation. Mirror twins, all the same, don't separate until later, around the eighth to 12th mean solar day, after which a monozygote that split would most likely finish up conjoined.

Where identical twins are close—frequently thinking similarly and communicating wordlessly—mirror twins are like ane person split in ii. If i mirror twin has a birthmark on his correct shoulder, the other has one on his left. When ane of the twins is a lefty, the other favors the right hand. Where Tyler Winklevoss is more left-brained and belittling, Cameron is more empathetic and goofier. Interviewing them together is similar interviewing a single source, because they not but consummate each other'due south sentences, they also actively recall together.

Moreover, they aren't simply built like professional person athletes; because they train together, work together, and eat together, they remain physically the same. It was one of the keys to their success at rowing—they movement identically merely equally opposites, righty and lefty. When their high schoolhouse rowing coach met them for the kickoff time, the twins told me, he commented that God had dropped them on his front porch.

Correct from the get-go, the Winklevoss brothers became two of my most valuable sources. Not only were they beginning-person—admitting very subjective—witnesses to the birth of Facebook, merely they had admission to thousands of pages of court documents involving depositions of every major grapheme. Even more intriguing, from the very commencement it was obvious they had intense feelings almost Zuckerberg, and what they perceived to be his many betrayals.

Though their dispute was eventually settled in mediation, they were not content to ride—or row—off into the sunset. The settlement itself came to a head in unique mode, something I did not detect out about until well after The Social Network. After months of meetings with lawyers, the twins had the idea to sit down, face to face, with Zuckerberg and piece of work things out. They were but three college kids who had met in a dining hall, after all—shouldn't they be able to shake hands and come to a fair understanding? They took the proposal to Zuckerberg's lawyers, who returned with an odd request. Zuckerberg had agreed to the meeting in principle—but he had what the lawyers described as "security concerns." He wanted to come across with but one of the twins, not both. Patently, the twins recalled thinking, Zuckerberg was afraid they were going to beat out him upward. So the meeting took place—just Cameron and Mark—in a glass-walled office surrounded by lawyers.

It was this final-ditch meeting that potentially led to the settlement itself: $65 one thousand thousand—which, against the communication of their lawyers, the twins took equally $45 million in stock. That alone turned out to exist one of the all-time decisions they ever made: Half dozen years after the IPO, the share price had quintupled, and the twins' holdings are now estimated at nearly $500 million. But the brothers hadn't taken such a big chunk of the settlement in stock considering of what it might be worth—they'd taken stock considering they truly believed they should be part of Facebook. Zuckerberg might not have idea much of the HarvardConnection or their computer code, only the twins believed that many of their ideas were integral to the social network's success. The fact that you needed a harvard.edu email to sign on in the beginning, for example, creating a sense of exclusivity. And the concept of circles of connections, from family to friends to classmates. Tyler and Cameron didn't think they'd created Facebook, only they did believe their names deserved to be mentioned on that masthead somewhere. The massive settlement fabricated them rich, only it wasn't going to heal the wounds of betrayal.

After settling the example, the twins' initial plan was to dive back into the tech world as VCs, using the settlement money to invest in Silicon Valley startups—mayhap find another Facebook equally investors. Just they quickly discovered that Zuckerberg'southward shadow made this an impossible goal. Every company in the Valley had the aforementioned endgame—to sell their startup to Facebook. Nobody would take a chance having the last name of the two people Zuckerberg hated nigh in the world on their spreadsheets.

Despondent, the brothers headed to Ibiza to lick their wounds. And there, at the Bluish Marlin, a famous beach gild/disco brimming with bronzed, beautiful people, a take a chance come across changed everything.

Over the past decade, I'd stayed remotely in impact with the twins—coming together them one time or twice in New York, seeing them at restaurants in L.A.—but I knew very lilliputian about what they had been upward to since The Social Network. Although they'd been part of the hoopla effectually the picture show—attending the premiere, meeting with Armie Hammer every bit he prepared to play them—the media hadn't been kind to them. They had get such caricatures—aroused jocks in suits—that Larry Summers, the sometime president of Harvard who had famously kicked them out of his role when they'd tried to bespeak out that Zuckerberg had broken the school code of conduct, publicly ridiculed them on stage at the Aspen Institute, calling them assholes.

Because of this, I wasn't expecting the New York Times article that popped up on my Google news browser i random morn a twelvemonth and a half ago declaring that Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss had suddenly go the world'due south beginning well-known Bitcoin billionaires.

Merely equally I'd tangentially known what Facebook was when I'd first met Saverin a decade ago, I likewise had some awareness of Bitcoin when I read the Times article. I knew Bitcoin was a course of digital money—cryptocurrency—that had appeared out of nowhere in 2009 and had run from pennies per coin in value to more than $ten,000 a coin (and would eventually top out at double that, earlier sliding dorsum to roughly $5,000 today). Other than that, I was a Bitcoin novice. I certainly had no idea that the twins were involved to such a caste—that in fact, they were at the eye of this cryptocurrency revolution. I immediately emailed them, and a day after reading the commodity, I was in New York, walking into an part in the Flatiron district filled with computers and buzzing with dozens of employees, nearly all of them seemingly under the age of 30.

As it turned out, not merely did the twins own an enormous number of Bitcoins, they had also built a crypto commutation chosen Gemini—substantially, a stock exchange for crypto coins. They'd get a part of Bitcoin'south growth story by investing in Bitinstant, a company whose young CEO, Charlie Shrem, ended upwardly being arrested for money-laundering Bitcoin, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, and was sentenced to jail for a twelvemonth.

Every bit the twins proceeded to tell me their story, I was immediately engaged. On that beach in Ibiza, they said, their chance encounter was with 1 of Shrem'south colleagues—a man named David Azar, who showtime told them near the cryptocurrency. The history of Bitcoin was fascinating—how information technology was launched in a "white paper" submitted to a cryptography board by a mysterious person, to this day unidentified, calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto; how Nakamoto saw it every bit a revolution in money, a currency built for the Cyberspace that could be exchanged instantly, each transaction verified by the Bitcoin community itself; how it was initially embraced past libertarians and anarchists, who saw the idea of a digital grade of money transferred in the aforementioned way you lot'd send a text or an email as a way of keeping currency out of the reach of banks and governments; how initially, information technology grew to prominence primarily as a way of buying illicit goods on Silk Road, an underground drug bazar lodged deep in the "night web"; and how information technology shifted into something more important afterward a financial crisis on the tiny European isle and notorious taxation haven of Cyprus suddenly made the idea of a form of money you could store on a computer pull a fast one on, a difficult drive, or even your arm brand a lot more sense.

All the same even more incredible to me was that it was these two characters—the Winklevoss twins, a.k.a. the Winklevii—who had jumped and so deep into this earth that they'd now emerged as two of its nearly famous players. At first, they thought Bitcoin was either the side by side big thing or a scam. Just the deeper they delved into the theories backside it, the more than they began to believe that it was something significant. The truth is, coin is already mostly digital. When you deposit cash into a bank, it doesn't sit in some vault somewhere—it instantly becomes zeros and ones, bouncing through computerized ledgers. Bitcoin just took this 1 step further, erasing the need for the bank—and the government that watches over it—past using the online community itself to verify transactions as they happen. Bitcoin "miners" who run software solving complicated mathematical problems log transactions for anybody to see, in exchange earning coins—a self-incentive system that makes an overarching authority unnecessary.

The twins loved the idea of a form of currency that did not rely on human intervention but instead was built on math. Once they were convinced it was non merely a scam—that Bitcoin actually worked—they fabricated an incredible bet, buying up 120,000 coins, one per centum of the entire finite supply at the fourth dimension, at an boilerplate price of below $10 a money. At the same time, they invested in Shrem'due south company, and began traveling the globe pushing the currency to investors, media outlets, and politicians. They even ended up testifying in front of the New York State Department of Financial Services in a public hearing on the hereafter of crypto.

Once once more, to the twins, it wasn't virtually the money; becoming billionaires was a byproduct of their battle for Bitcoin's acceptance, not its goal. To them, Bitcoin truly seemed to be some other revolution, on par with Facebook in how information technology might i day change the earth. And as I followed them to certificate this new journey, I had no option but to readjust my view of the two guys in skeleton costumes.

I don't believe the twins' 2d act is accidental, nor exercise I recollect Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have been a part of ii revolutions just past chance. In the end, as much equally I believe that The Social Network and my book got Marking Zuckerberg exactly right, we simply might take gotten the Winklevoss twins exactly incorrect.

Source: https://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2019/05/29/winklevoss-twins/

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