The Winklevoss twins are filed in popular memory as the men who lost Facebook — the Olympic rowers, the Harvard classmates who said Mark Zuckerberg took their idea for a campus social network and built it as his own. They sued in 2004. In 2008 they settled, for a package reported at around sixty-five million dollars: roughly twenty million in cash and the rest in Facebook stock. For most of the next decade that settlement was the punchline — the twins who fought the most valuable company of the age and walked away with a rounding error of it.
This is where the Bureau's usual story breaks. Most of our files end with the money gone. This one is the rare case of a settlement that became the setup for a far larger fortune — and it became one because the people holding it did the single most contrarian thing available in 2013.
They bought bitcoin. Around eleven million dollars of it, at a price of roughly a hundred and twenty dollars a coin, back when buying eleven million dollars of bitcoin meant moving a meaningful slice of every coin that existed. At the peak of their accumulation the twins were reported to hold on the order of one percent of all the bitcoin in the world. The men who couldn't hold on to Facebook had, quietly, taken a position the size of which almost nobody else on earth could match.
When bitcoin crossed twenty thousand dollars in late 2017, the arithmetic did what arithmetic does to one percent of a global asset, and the Winklevoss twins became, by most reckonings, the first bitcoin billionaires. They put a chunk of it into building Gemini, a regulated crypto exchange, which itself went public years later. The settlement everyone laughed at had been laundered, through sheer conviction and timing, into one of the best-returning bets of the century.
The Bureau's finding: the only file in this drawer where losing the fortune was the beginning. Saverin sued his way back to a couple of billion; the Winklevii were paid to leave and turned the exit money into more than the people who paid them ever imagined. The Bureau finds this deeply unfair, in the way that the best stories are. Status — redeemed, with interest.