Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, AKA the Winklevoss twins, who became famous when they sued Mark Zuckerberg claiming he stole the Facebook idea from them, are now billionaires. And they do so because of their early investment in Bitcoin.
The twins sued Zuckerberg in 2004 claiming he stole their ConnectU idea to create his social networking site. Although they failed to gain control of Facebook, they ultimately won $65 million from the lawsuit.
How They Became Super-Rich
The Winklevoss twins invested part of their Facebook payout in Bitcoin in 2013. They paid $11 million to buy BTC which at the time was traded at around $120. That made them owners of 1% of all bitcoins in circulation. Asked about their investment Tyler Winklevoss had said:
“We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error.”
The two brothers invested heavily in Bitcoin at a time when the cryptocurrency was seeing lots of negative news (Mt. Gox, Silk Road arrests etc). But they were certain that Bitcoin was not a short-term trend nor a bubble: “People say it’s a Ponzi scheme, it’s a bubble,” Cameron had said. “People really don’t want to take it seriously. At some point that narrative will shift to ‘virtual currencies are here to stay.’ We’re in the early days.”
Fast forward today, the investment in Bitcoin has proved to be a huge success for the Winklevoss twins. Bitcoin surged past the $10,000 mark and it is now traded at $11,100, which means that two brothers control a slice of the Bitcoin pie worth more than $1 billion.
Therefore, the brothers proved to be absolutely right in their prediction about Bitcoin. "If Bitcoin is a better gold or seen as a type of gold-like asset, then it could be in the trillions on a market cap," Tyler Winklevoss told CNNMoney in 2015. "We do feel those are very real possibilities."
The twins have never sold a single Bitcoin, according to a report in The Telegraph. The report notes that only a handful of Bitcoin wallets hold more than $1 billion worth of BTC. One of those wallets belongs to Satoshi Nakamoto.