![]() ![]() ![]() Hacking his way to photos of female 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.Įnter: the Winklevoss twins. Zuckerberg, his best friend, decided on a much more inventive strategy. Saverin, from a wealthy Brazilian family, hoped to become a member of one of Harvard’s secretive final clubs to jump-start his social life. A tale of two best friends who were far from social stars, more comfortable in front of their computer screens, and pathetically challenged when it came to matters of the opposite sex. Despondent but not yet desperate, he started the conversation abruptly: “Mark Zuckerberg fucked me.”įrom there, he proceeded to tell me the crazy story at the heart of what would eventually become The Social Network. When Eduardo Saverin walked into Bar 10, he looked a little like a dog that had been kicked a few times. Curious, I arranged to meet the subject of the email the next night at Bar 10 at the Westin in the Back Bay. I had heard of someone named Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, but I wasn’t aware that anyone else might have been involved. At the time, it wasn’t the megalith that it is today, but a fair number of my friends were using the social network on a daily basis. ![]() It was from a Harvard student named Will McMullen, and to paraphrase, it basically said: My best friend founded Facebook, and nobody has ever heard of him. But this particular email struck me as different. Because of the success of my book Bringing Down the House, and the resulting movie, 21, I was used to getting emails from college kids describing various schemes and adventures that usually ended in fortunes (or jail time). My journey to Bitcoin Billionaires began more than 11 years ago, with a strange little email sent to my website in February 2008. The Winklevoss twins are the subject of Ben Mezrich’s new book, Bitcoin Billionaires. I grew up on ’80s archetypes, and I am now fully aware that there’s often a fine line between vivid, real-life characters-and caricatures. It’s easy to judge the brothers by how they look, how they dress, and where they come from. And the irony is not lost on me that the result of this research, and my new book, Bitcoin Billionaires, is really a reassessment of the image of the twins that I was partially responsible for creating. For the past year and a half, I’ve been documenting the Winklevoss twins’ wild ride into the brand-new world of cryptocurrencies. In an unlikely second act, these former emblems of the establishment have suddenly been recast as revolutionaries, carrying the flag for a disruptive new technology that might one day overshadow Zuckerberg’s creation itself. Zuckerberg-caught up in scandal after scandal involving everything from his platform misusing private data to helping spread political disinformation-seems more James Bond villain than plucky, awkward hero.Īnd even more surprising, the twins are also back in the news. It is the establishment, one of the silos controlling much of the data that flows through the Internet. Today, Zuckerberg is no longer the revolutionary Facebook, the company that grew out of his dorm room, is now one of the most powerful businesses on earth. Pitted against them, first in a dining hall at Kirkland House on the Harvard campus and then, eventually, in a mediation chamber surrounded by lawyers, Zuckerberg was their polar opposite-a rebellious computer geek trying to disrupt the social order for what he perceived to be the greater good.īut now, 10 years later, that dynamic has suddenly reversed. In my-and Aaron Sorkin’s, and David Fincher’s-telling, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss were the ultimate big men on campus: the cool kids at Harvard, jocks who showed up for classes wearing suits and ties, children of a self-made tycoon who were members of the Porcellian, the poshest of all the university’s semi-secret, all-male final clubs. I’ve always believed that if the Winklevoss twins didn’t exist in real life, Hollywood would have invented them.Īs portrayed nearly a decade ago in The Social Network, the movie adapted from my 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, the college-age pair cut quite a celluloid spectacle: chiseled, privileged, painfully blond 6-foot-5 identical-twin Olympic rowers-the perfect foils to the über-nerdy, socially awkward Mark Zuckerberg, caught up in the Shakespearian drama at the heart of the founding of Facebook, the social network that grew from a college experiment to a company that now dominates much of our lives. Tech gurus Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss.
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