Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss first garnered fame through the highly-publicized dispute over the founding of Facebook.
The future Olympic rowing twins were Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmates in the early 2000s. During their undergrad years, the pair, along with a fellow classmate named Divya Narendra founded the social networking website ConnectU. All three students claim Zuckerberg stole their idea to create what is now seen as one of the world’s biggest social networking sites worth about $418.9 billion.
Their legal battle became known all over the world once it hit the big screen in “The Social Network.” The 2010 film based on the story of Facebook’s founding and was an adaptation off of Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book “The Accidental Billionaires,” according to Forbes.
However, following a longstanding legal battle, the twins agreed to a settlement worth $65 million, $20 million in cash and $45 million in Facebook stock. However, after the company went public, the twin’s $45 million in shares skyrocketed VanityFair reported.
Despite being wrapped up in court proceedings, however, the Winklevoss brothers have busied themselves both in sports and in finance.
The Greenwich, Conn., twins had been rowing since they were 15 years old, Greenwich Times reported. They were crew members while attending Harvard University and during their graduate years at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. In 2008, the dynamic duo competed at the Beijing Olympics and finished sixth in the men’s pairs final, according to Greenwich Time.
Later on, the pair took their earnings from their settlement with Zuckerberg and invested heavily in Bitcoin, one of the most well known cryptocurrencies.
The move made them “the first prominent virtual currency millionaires in 2013,” the New York Times reported.
Shortly after, they founded Gemini, a cryptocurrency exchange based in New York City. The idea behind the exchange was to create a secure ecosystem that is “free of hacking, fraud and security breaches,” to move cryptocurrency out of Wild West days and into something that’s regulated, secure and used by regular people.
In 2019, Bloomberg pegged their combined net worth, which consists mainly of Bitcoin and crypto assets, to about $1.45 billion.
