I stumbled upon an interesting short story about the Winklevoss Brothers suing Mark Zuckerberg many years ago for stealing their Facebook idea. I’ve read multiple articles and here is a summary of everything I have learned.
Back in 2004, the Winklevoss brothers sued Mark Zuckerberg saying he took their idea for Facebook. They ended up settling for $65 million in 2008. But here's where it gets interesting…
Instead of just keeping the money, the twins did something bold. In 2013, they put a big chunk of it into Bitcoin when it was worth about $120 for each coin!
Their investment, which seemed like a lot back then, grew a lot. Bitcoin's price went way up, making the Winklevoss twins some of the earliest Bitcoin billionaires.
Fun fact: The Winklevoss brothers founded Gemini in 2014.
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those guys where at the right place at the right time and had the funds to do it.
TIL Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from the Winklevoss twins
They said they won’t consider selling until btc hits 500k a coin. They have so much conviction
Theres a movie about it.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/
Zuckerberg also booted/kicked out his friend and co-founder Eduardo Saverin.
He did it so he could take control of everything.
He did this by creating a new company to acquire the old company, and then distribute new shares in the new company to everybody fairly except to Saverin. Saverin’s stake was diluted to far less than 1%.
He is…not a good human being.
Saverin sued him later and won.
And yes, there is high chance Zuck stole the idea. Actually he did.
Making bold choices gives you high rewards. They risked a good chunk of their money and it paid off big.
Imagine having the balls to invest $11m in BTC in 2013. The market cap around then must be 1.2B. They literally owned around 1% of all the BTC back then.
One of the brothers called it the greatest trade of all time, and I think he will be proven correct.
These brothers are probably set for life.
Did they put the BTC on a cold storage device?
How did the buy the BTC? Did they send 11Mio to the exchange and bought BTC? Did they transf all BTC to their colkd stroage and kept it on the exchange
10/10 Move, it is like they predicted the future.
So they bought about 91666k BTC ?
I remember it was reported they had a 100k or more Bitcoins
And I believe they still do, these guys already had money and understood Bitcoin back then
That’s over $2.3 billion today. Best decision ever!
When Bitcoin reaches $500k they won’t sell everything because they are unlikely to find something better and with a higher return on investment. They will just wait for $1M.
11 million dollars in bitcoin that early? that takes massive balls to be this level of risk taker as BTC’s future was very uncertain back then
And now the SEC is poised to shut them down.
The Winklevoss bro sound like legends
Tyler Winklevoss, likes and comments on my X posts sometimes, pretty chuffed as I have 55 followers.
And yes it’s the real Taylor Winklevoss he has 1.5m followers
I mean, I use Gemini more than I use Meta. Winklevosses FTW
Step 1. Be rich
Step 2. Be stupid
TLDR: How to become rich with bitcoin – start with $11 million. /s
Don’t forget how quickly he decided to rebrand Facebook to Meta at the peak of the Metaverse hype.
This always stuck with me:
>On March 27 the forums and the news site Reddit lit up with calculations of what value, for a single coin, would take the market capitalization over $1 billion, and the number settled on was $91.26. This calculation was largely theoretical: most of the outstanding coins had been purchased for pennies or a few dollars in the early years, and if everyone tried to sell for $91, the price would plummet. But it marked a psychological line in the sand that was, if nothing else, fun to talk about. That day, Cameron Winklevoss, who had taken responsibility for the twins’ buying and selling of Bitcoins, was watching the price closely, first from the twins’ office and then from home. After midnight, as he was preparing to go to bed, he saw the price approach the magical border of a billion. As the number crept closer and closer, he placed a small order on Mt. Gox that would be executed only if the seller agreed to a price above $91.26. The order was quickly filled and he watched the value of a Bitcoin on Mt. Gox—determined by the last order—jump to $91.27. Twitter and Reddit went wild. The next morning, Cameron gleefully reported to Tyler that it was their money that was responsible for sending the value of all Bitcoin over $1 billion for the first time.
From Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper
LOL, the Winklevoss twins are famous because they sued Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook and were early investors in Bitcoin.
TLDR – it’s easy to make money when you already have loads of it.
Read “Bitcoin Billionaires” which is a story of the Winklevoss twins from their time at Harvard to starting Gemini. It’s a cool history lesson about the early days of bitcoin.
The way this is written makes me feel old af.
I was just talking to my cousin about the winklevoss brothers yesterday, they are very interesting
This story just makes me so angry that the mark fuckerberg is still so successful on a stolen idea and now he’s stealing people’s information. He should be placed in jail along side with sbf and do kwon.
If you only just discovered this today, here’s a little bit more detail you probably didn’t know.
It never went to court and was settled at mediation. This meant that Zuck at least knew he was going to settle but just wanted to put the Winklevii through the pain of a 24hr meeting.
The settlement was actually $45M in Facebook shares and $20M in cash of which the lawyers took $13M as a contingent fee.
That left $7M in cash which is what the brothers actually put in Bitcoin. They may have topped it up themselves as they were already wealthy.
The shares were priced at $35 each although this was a stitch up for the brothers because internally facebook only valued the shares at $8 meaning they should have paid the brother approximately 4x the quantity of shares.
The brothers took Zuck to court over that, but lost because during mediation the discussions are inadmissible in an subsequent court hearing.
Nevertheless the value of FB shares went from $35 to $150 before they sold some so they really shouldn’t complain.