Double trouble

Most people know Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss from the 2010 film The Social Network, which dramatized the story of Facebook's origins. In the movie, the identical twins (both played by actor Armie Hammer) claim that Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea. The film references the lawsuits that followed. When it came out, Facebook's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said it was "Hollywood. It's fiction." But the arguments were real.

More recently, the Winklevoss twins, or "Winklevii," as they're often called, have been involved in another public feud, this time, with crypto mogul Barry Silbert over hundreds of millions of dollars in customer assets. The brothers became Bitcoin billionaires, having invested in crypto early, after digital strategist David Azar told them about the new cryptocurrency back in 2012. At the time, few people knew about Bitcoin, and that meeting shaped the twins' future. According to Forbes, they still own around 70,000 Bitcoins and, as of February 2023, had an estimated worth of $1.1 billion each.

Breaking into blockchain

A year later, the twins began their career in crypto. In May 2013, they invested $1.5 million in an exchange called BitInstant, which charged fees to exchange dollars for Bitcoins in minutes. It grew quickly but was shut down by the end of that year. As crypto was still highly unregulated, some of the transactions had been laundering money for drug dealers selling on the online black market known as the "Silk Road." The CEO of BitInstant, Charlie Shrem, was arrested. The brothers then took a more hands-on approach, to avoid trouble with the law, and started their own cryptocurrency exchange, Gemini, in 2014.

Gemini is the twins' zodiac sign and the name of NASA's second space mission. "We actually call our employees ‘astronauts,'" Cameron Winklevoss told Forbes in 2021. Tyler added: "We feel like we're on a spaceship, exploring a new frontier." They were confident that crypto was the future. Tyler even tweeted, "The U.S. dollar is fast becoming toilet paper," and that Bitcoin was the only savior.

A crypto dream becomes a nightmare

The twins' goal was to bring some regulation to an industry often described as the "Wild West." In 2015, Gemini became one of the first Bitcoin-focused financial institutions to be designated a trust bank by the New York Department of Financial Services. This implied at least that the company would be subject to the same regulatory standards as traditional banks.

Certainly, Gemini promoted itself in this way — with the slogan "crypto without the chaos," for example. With traditional bank accounts offering close to zero interest, many private investors were tempted by the promise of "regulated crypto."

Then, in late 2022, the promise turned out to be an illusion when FTX, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, collapsed and took most of the crypto market with it. The fallout from this disaster is still being felt, but one of the early casualties was Barry Silbert's cryptocurrency firm Genesis, which, according to the Financial Times, is the biggest unsecured creditor of FTX. However, a lot of the money Genesis lent to FTX had actually come from Gemini customers.

Unable to repay panicking investors, Genesis's lending unit declared bankruptcy. Gemini customers are reportedly owed $766 million. In January 2023, both Genesis and Gemini were charged with illegally selling crypto assets to hundreds of thousands of investors. The Winklevoss brothers have been active on Twitter, threatening legal action. "The Winklevoss brand is severely tarnished," wrote Aaron Brown in January 2023, a crypto investor who writes for Bloomberg Opinion.

A privileged childhood

Whether the twins will continue working in crypto or try something new is unclear, but they have both privilege and experience that can help them to bounce back. Born in 1981 in Southampton, New York, the twins grew up in a wealthy family in Greenwich, Connecticut. Their father is a businessman and academic who teaches actuarial science at the University of Pennsylvania. And the boys showed talent early on. Aged 13, they taught themselves HTML. They started a rowing club at their high school. And in 2000, they went to Harvard University to study economics. Throughout their lives, they've done everything together, from sports to studying, from vacations to business ventures. The identical twins even dress alike.

No friends in business

It was at Harvard that they first met Mark Zuckerberg, in October 2003. Along with another friend, Divya Narendra, they sat down with Zuckerberg to discuss their idea for a social network, ConnectU, that they'd been working on over the past year. Unbeknownst to the others, Zuckerberg was working on a solo project. In January 2004, he registered the domain "thefacebook.com," launching his social network just three weeks later. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss found out when they read about it in the campus newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.

The same year, ConnectU filed a lawsuit against Facebook. The twins alleged that Zuckerberg had broken an oral contract with them. In the end, a settlement was reached in 2008. The twins were awarded cash and Facebook stock, some $65 million in total. It turned out to be a long, drawn-out affair — the twins lacked important information about the stock value, which meant they received just a quarter of what Zuckerberg's settlement had promised. The brothers decided to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, but they changed their minds in 2011. They were moving on.

In the years after Facebook's launch, they were busy with other projects. They competed together in the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing in the men's pair rowing event, coming sixth. In 2009, they went to Oxford University, in the U.K., to get their MBAs. Now, more than a decade later, the feuds continue, but so do the twins' business ventures.