Bitcoin Billionaires

by Ben Mezrich

  They believed Zuckerberg had wronged them in 2004 by stealing their idea for what became Facebook, had wronged them a second time by deep-sixing the damaging IMs during litigation, and had wronged them a third time on the settlement agreement’s stock valuation—they had indeed lost, by winning.

  Despite receiving stock potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, an enormous sum by any standard, the twins felt like losers—Zuckerberg had managed to fuck them in the ear over and over again. And not only that, going up against Zuckerberg in such a public fashion had taken its toll on their image in the court of public opinion. They were torn apart in the media and ridiculed by the blogosphere as spoiled and entitled brats with a nasty case of sour grapes. Whereas each time another example of Zuckerberg’s Shakespearean betrayals became public, the media seemed to look the other way.

  Even Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, took a shot at them, publicly calling them “assholes” while onstage at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech Conference, hosted at the Aspen Institute. The twins’ offense? Wearing jackets and ties when they’d attended President Summers’s office hours in April of 2004 to discuss Zuckerberg’s duplicitous behavior—behavior they believed was a direct violation of the Harvard Student Handbook, specifically the part of the Handbook that stated: All students will be honest and forthcoming in their dealings with members of the Harvard community. In addition, there was an expectation of “intellectual honesty” and “respect for the dignity of others.”

  Summers’s public attack seemed so unfair, so disgraceful for an educator, let alone a current Harvard professor, that the twins wrote an open letter to then Harvard president, Drew Faust, expressing their concerns regarding Summer’s conduct:

  … At [March] office hours, we [Cameron, Tyler, and Divya] waited in his [President Summers’s] reception area but were told that we would have to return next month because there were more students in the queue than time allowed. In April of 2004, we returned to office hours and were successful in meeting with President Summers. His manner was not inconsistent with his reputation and present-day admissions of being tactfully challenged. It was not his failure to shake hands with the three of us upon entering his office (doing so would have required him to take his feet off his desk and stand up from his chair), nor his tenor that was most alarming, but rather his scorn for a genuine discourse on deeper ethical questions, Harvard’s Honor Code, and its applicability or lack thereof.

  We now further understand why our meeting was less than productive; someone who does not value ethics with respect to his own conduct, would likely have little interest in this subject as it related to the conduct of others. Perhaps there is a “variability of aptitude” for decency and professionalism among university faculty.

  Regardless, it is deeply disturbing that a professor of this university openly admits to making character judgments of students based on their appearance. It goes without saying that every student should feel free to bring issues forward, dress how they see fit, or express themselves without fear of prejudice or public disparagement from a fellow member of the community, much less so from a faculty member.

  Ironically, our choice of attire that day was made out of respect and deference to the office of the President. As the current President, we respectfully ask for you to address this unprecedented betrayal of the unique relationship between teacher and student. We look forward to your response.

  Despite Summers openly admitting to making character judgments about the twins, his students, based on their appearance, the media snickered and President Faust sidestepped their letter and declined to admonish him.

  Perhaps it was no surprise that Summers’s tenure as president of Harvard was quick and judged by many to be a failure. In January 2005, at an academic conference on diversity in the sciences and engineering, Summers caused an uproar when he called into question the innate aptitude of women—as compared to men—in the sciences. Three months later, the Harvard faculty passed a “no confidence” vote in his leadership, and less than a year later, on February 21, 2006, Summers resigned. No one since the Civil War had served a shorter term as president of Harvard.

  After Harvard, Summers landed a job in the Obama administration, though Obama would soon pass on him for chair of the Federal Reserve, instead choosing Janet Yellen—a woman. Ironically, despite not appreciating Facebook’s enormous potential in its earliest days when it was sitting right in front of him in Harvard Yard—dismissing it during his meeting with the twins as an inconsequential student project—Summers managed to find his way onto a few boards of tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Square. This was thanks to some help from Sheryl Sandberg, who had joined Facebook as its chief operating officer in 2008. She was a former student of Summers—and later worked for him when he was secretary of the treasury under President Clinton. Perhaps Summers’s friendship with Sandberg had inspired him to lean in against the twins and try to even the score. Who knew?

  “No matter how many times we win this race,” Cameron said, from the stern of the boat, “it isn’t going to matter.”

  He was right. They had ended up with a vast amount of money; but to the world, they were losers. They weren’t going to change anyone’s minds by competing in another Olympics. Even standing on a podium wasn’t going to get them any sense of justice. They would just be dumb jocks who rode off into the sunset.

  “It’s not personal,” one of their lawyers had told them, “it’s business.” This was when they’d started questioning the number of Facebook shares Zuckerberg had given them. To Tyler, that was just as bad as Zuckerberg’s IM: “you can be unethical and still be legal.”

  It had never been just business between them and Zuckerberg, it had always been personal. And they had lost. If they wanted to change that narrative, they couldn’t do it with an oar.

  They needed to go back to the arena where it had all started and begin to fight all over again.

  3

  DAMAGED GOODS

  Four weeks later, Cameron’s thoughts were moving at a thousand rpms as he stepped out of the taxi that had taken them straight to the heart of Silicon Valley from SFO. It was “a thirty-minute ride” that never took less than an hour but was at least pretty pleasant if you took the 280 instead of the crapshoot that was the 101. Then again, Cameron had barely noticed the scenery as he sat next to his brother in the back of the cab, going through the heavy folder of company pitch decks they’d brought with them from New York City.

  After hanging up their oars and officially retiring from U.S. Olympic Crew, they’d dived headlong back into the high-tech entrepreneurial scene that was centered in Silicon Valley. But unlike Zuckerberg years earlier, they hadn’t moved west. Manhattan had been the easy choice for their home base of operations. Not only was it a more familiar setting for them (they’d grown up just outside of the city), but their father had made his fortune building a consulting firm that counted many New York–based Fortune 500 companies as clients. To them, no matter where ideas came from or where companies built their fancy campuses, New York City was the financial engine of the world.

  Since everything they did these days seemed to make the news, when they leased office space in the Flatiron District—the center of New York’s burgeoning tech scene, colloquially referred to as Silicon Alley—for their venture firm Winklevoss Capital, the deal was splashed all over the real estate section of the New York Post. With five thousand square feet of prime commercial real estate a few blocks from the Empire State Building, the twins were definitely looking to make their mark.

  Becoming angel investors—the name given to investors who provided early money to entrepreneurs with no strings attached—seemed like the quickest way for the twins to get their feet back into the startup game and give them the best chance of changing the ending of the story that had been forced upon them.

  Their colleague and co-plaintiff in their battle with Zuckerberg, Divya Narendra, had already begun his next chapter. After receiving hi
s law degree and MBA from Northeastern University, he’d gone all in on his new venture SumZero—a social network for investment professionals. Instead of sharing photos, users shared investment ideas. SumZero didn’t have billions of users—its users had billions of dollars. The company was quickly becoming the world’s largest network of its kind, and the twins were excited about investing in it. They wondered: How many more Divyas were out there hiding in plain sight? As an entrepreneur, you had one, maybe two, but usually not more than three chances to catch lightning in a bottle; as a venture capitalist, however, you could chase lightning as long as you had cash to invest.

  Cameron and Tyler had grown up around financiers. They understood that money was the lifeblood of any company. Without, first, Eduardo Saverin’s $1,000, then PayPal billionaire Peter Theil’s $500,000—Facebook would never have grown to be more than a few kids in a dorm room poking each other. It was money that had allowed Zuckerberg to feed Facebook’s voracious appetite for engineers and servers, resulting in world domination.

  Cameron’s feet hit the sidewalk in front of a multistory, wood-framed building that squatted between a small, paved parking lot and a semienclosed beer garden. Just ahead, a brightly colored sign took up one corner of the building, emblazoned with a picture of a palm tree that declared their destination in bulbous, orange letters: OASIS, and beneath that, maybe slightly less dramatically, BURGERS & PIZZA.

  Although as tech VCs he and his brother weren’t going to be coming up with the next Facebook themselves, maybe they would find it. Maybe they would even find it here; Cameron could feel a familiar thrill rising inside of him. They were opening a new chapter in their lives, and he could think of no better starting place than Oasis, the hamburger joint right smack in the center of Menlo Park.

  He knew that Tyler, sliding out of the taxi behind him, carrying the folder stuffed with business plans of companies looking for venture cash, would have told him to take a breath, temper his optimism. Although most people thought the Winklevoss brothers were completely identical, in fact, they were mirror image twins, the result of a fertilized egg splitting later than usual in the process, around the ninth day, and then developing as two separate embryos. Where fraternal twins were dizygotic—developing from two different eggs fertilized by two different sperm—identical twins were monozygotic—a single egg fertilized by a single sperm separating into two viable embryos. Mirror twins began in a similar fashion—a single egg fertilized by a single sperm—but remained intact for much longer; normal identical twins split between the second and fifth day. In fact, it could be said that mirror twins were two individuals who had remained a single entity as long as was biologically possible—beyond the tenth day, a monozygote that split would most likely end up a conjoined twin, attached forever.

  Like identical twins, mirror twins had the same physical features, but they were perfectly opposed, as if they were staring at each other in a mirror. If one twin had a birthmark on his left thigh, the other would have the exact same mark—on the right thigh.

  Like two pages in a book torn at the seams: Tyler was right-handed and more left-brained, analytical, measured, and strategy minded. Cameron was left-handed and more right-brained, tactical, operational minded, goofy, artistic, sometimes more empathetic, and sometimes more optimistic.

  Often Tyler focused on the stairs, not the steps, and Cameron was more willing to let his imagination roam past the data they had at hand. Neither of them would have described themselves as poets; but where Tyler focused on the black and white, Cameron tried to let himself see more color. They were both creative in their own intuitive way, and together they knew their minds had the potential to create something great.

  Now that they were centimillionaires because of their Facebook settlement, few people would understand why they were bothering themselves with trying to start again. The twins never needed to work a day in their lives; yet they chose to work every day of their lives. Why? What made them tick?

  The twins were driven by curiosity and the desire to explore. They thrived off of challenges and got a thrill out of testing their limits. To them, that was exciting, electric. Complacency was just not in their blood.

  At their core, Tyler and Cameron were builders. As kids they built LEGOs, as teenagers they built webpages, in college they built a social network. They weren’t on this Earth to exist. They were here to create.

  Despite what Zuckerberg thought of them—his misreading of them as simple, dumb jocks—at the age of thirteen, they had taught themselves how to code in HTML and had made money over the summer by building webpages for small businesses. At the time, their high school had not offered computer science, so instead they had loaded up on every advanced placement course possible. They had planned to study computer science at Harvard, but the time commitment of the rowing team had made it impossible, so they’d majored in economics instead. Zuckerberg had gotten lucky—in another world, the twins never would have had to approach him for coding help. In any event, Tyler and Cameron didn’t believe they were on the earth to exist; they were here to create, to build.

  And there was no greater place to build the future than Silicon Valley. It was more than a place filled with entrepreneurs toting pitch decks: Silicon Valley was a living, breathing organism.

  It had a circulatory system, represented by the big name VCs in their low-rise California ranch-style office parks, lined up along nearby Sand Hill Road: first settled by Kleiner Perkins in 1972, the proverbial “Sand Hill” was now home to the likes of Sequoia, Accel, Founders Fund, and Andreessen Horowitz, to name a few. Sand Hill pumped cash into the veins of fetal startups, helping them uncurl their tiny fingers and toes.

  It had its vital organs, the megacompanies that had taken that lifeblood and grown viable and strong: Google, up in Mountain View, with its massive campus called the Googleplex, sixty buildings teeming with engineers and software developers and AI experts; Apple in Cupertino, on its way to becoming the most valuable company in the world, in the midst of constructing a new headquarters built to look like a massive spaceship that had crashed down to Earth; Facebook, of course, which had first opened its doors just blocks away from where Cameron was standing, and was now located at 1 Hacker Way, spitting out newly minted millionaires every week, inflating the local housing market to the top of the national charts and making the zip codes around Sand Hill the wealthiest in the United States; Intel and Tesla, and Twitter, on and on and on, each as important to the system as a liver or a kidney or a lung. Then there were the vestigial organs, like the famous HP and Apple garages, tourist spots where visitors could imagine themselves as young genius engineers on the cusp of changing the world.

  The organism even had its brain: Stanford University, in Palo Alto, every year emitting dozens of brilliant young computer scientists and engineers like neurotransmitters moving along the neurons of the Valley’s nervous system, teaming up to leap across the various synapses in their paths.

  And, of course, it had its digestive system, the eateries, breakfast spots, and coffee shops where the Valley’s royalty congregated, sharing innovations over scrambled eggs, chai lattes, and french fries.

  The Oasis might not have been quite as famous as nearby Buck’s of Woodside, where PayPal was first demoed and a VC was once pitched something called Yahoo!, but the burger joint and beer garden around the corner from the original Facebook offices had played host to entrepreneurs, investors, and wide-eyed, bushy-tailed Valley dreamers for decades. Opened right after prohibition ended, the casual spot had become one of Cameron and Tyler’s favorite places for meetings. In fact, it had originally been a favorite of their parents when they had lived in Palo Alto before moving their young family to the East Coast after their father sold his first company to Johnson & Higgins, one of the largest insurance brokerage firms in the world. Though at first it had seemed strange taking meetings in the shadow of Zuckerberg’s nearby kingdom, they were well aware that everyone in the Valley identified them with the boy CEO anywa
y, so there was no reason to try and hide from the association. And besides, Oasis served damn good burgers.

  Tyler reached the door first, but let Cameron go ahead of him as they entered the restaurant. Cameron was struck by the smell of french fries, grilled meat, and spilled beer; even though it was past two in the afternoon, the place was packed. Everyone looked impossibly young; Cameron guessed that at least half were still students at Stanford, the rest barely past graduation. He couldn’t help wondering how many of the tables he passed were taken up by Facebook employees. As he and Tyler moved through the crowd, people stared and pointed, and then pretended to look away. Nothing really unusual about that; people tended to stare and point wherever they went. Even before the movie, before Harvard, the twins always seemed to catch people’s attention. But here was different.

  Cameron was starting to feel a slight tug at the optimism that had filled him outside; it wasn’t just Tyler’s usual caution mirrored inside his mind, but something he’d allowed himself to push away during the long flight from New York and the ride from the airport. Although they’d set up Winklevoss Capital a few months earlier, and had put the word out that they were looking to invest in young tech startups, they had yet to close a deal. Although the folder in Tyler’s hands was large, many of the companies inside had already moved from possible investments to missed opportunities.

  Because it was just the two of them, they were able to move quickly when they liked something, setting up calls and flying cross-country at almost a moment’s notice when something peaked their interest. But over and over again, mostly because of what appeared to be bad timing, they’d found themselves about to write a check, when they’d get a message from the entrepreneur that unfortunately, the funding round had just closed, or was “oversubscribed.” Not entirely unusual in a world where multimillion-dollar rounds could come together in an afternoon, and there was so much money chasing the next big thing—but it was still incredibly frustrating. They had money ready to wire, but they could never seem to connect.