Bitcoin Billionaires

by Ben Mezrich

  Cameron held himself back from saying the obvious: he, Tyler, and Divya believed, deeply and firmly, that Facebook had actually risen out of their own idea—a website initially called Harvard Connection, later renamed ConnectU, that was a social network of its own aimed at helping college students connect with one another online. Cameron, Tyler, and Divya had come up with the Harvard Connection out of their frustration with how narrow their campus experience had become. Freshman year was one big melting pot. Hell, it was during freshman week that Divya met Cameron by chance in Harvard Yard and invited him to his dorm room to play electric guitar. From that day on they were fast friends. Over time, however, these serendipitous social collisions seemed to fade on campus as everyone got busier and busier. It was hard to extend your group of friends beyond your dorm, your sport, or your major. The twins and Divya lamented this and set out to fix it. The Harvard Connection—ConnectU—a virtual campus—would recast campus life online with none of the physical barriers and rigid, impermeable social bubbles that existed in the off-line world. Freshman year could start all over again, but this time everyone would be much the wiser—youth wouldn’t be wasted on the young.

  In the spring of 2003, the codebase was nearing completion; however, their original programmer, Sanjay Mavinkurve, was graduating and heading to Mountain View, California, to work for Google. This forced the twins and Divya to find someone else to help them complete the codebase. Victor Gao worked on it through the summer, but his upcoming senior thesis commitments were too demanding for him to continue once the school year started, so he introduced them to a sophomore computer science major who seemed to have an interest in entrepreneurial projects.

  By this point, the Harvard Connection, ConnectU codebase had been built out to organize users according to the domain name of their email address. So, for instance, if a user registered with a Harvard.edu email address, he or she would be automatically organized and placed in the Harvard network. This would bring order to the chaos of lumping everyone into one large network. Like a Russian nesting doll, ConnectU would be a network of smaller networks, which in turn would be networks of smaller networks and so on, regressing all the way down to the individual user.

  Divya and the twins had designed ConnectU this way based on their epiphany that a person’s email address was not only a good way to authenticate their identity but also a good proxy for his or her real-life social network—your email address was your virtual passport. The Harvard registrar only issued @harvard.edu email addresses to Harvard students. Goldman Sachs only issued @goldmansachs.com email addresses to Goldman Sachs employees. Chances were, if you had one of these email addresses, you were in some shape or form a part of those networks in real life. This framework would give the ConnectU network an integrity that other social networks like Friendster and Myspace lacked. It would organize users in a way that allowed them to find one another more easily, and connect in a more meaningful way. It was in fact the same framework that would soon launch the sophomore computer science major they hired into worldwide fame and internet dominance.

  In the twins’ opinion, the only networks Mark Zuckerberg was familiar with were computer ones. From the twins’ own social interactions with him, it was clear that Mark was a lot more comfortable talking with machines than with people. Seen this way, it actually made a lot more sense if the world’s biggest social network was in fact the offspring of an unlikely marriage between the twins and Zuckerberg, as opposed to Zuckerberg’s brainchild alone. The idea of the solitary genius who invents something brilliant all by himself is the stuff of movies, a Hollywood myth. In reality, the greatest companies in the world were started by dynamic duos; Jobs and Wozniak, Brin and Page, Gates and Allen, the list went on and on. And, Cameron believed, should have included Zuckerberg and Winklevoss. Or Winklevoss and Zuckerberg.

  Sitting at that conference table, Cameron had to acknowledge to himself what Zuckerberg had done was truly impressive. Whatever he’d taken from them, he’d grown it into a true revolution. Somehow that diminutive, pale kid sporting a hairstyle that looked like the work of Supercuts had changed the world. And so he made sure to tell him so. He talked about how what Zuckerberg had created was incredible, the sort of innovation that happened maybe once in a generation.

  When Cameron paused, Zuckerberg added his own congratulations. He seemed genuinely impressed that Cameron and Tyler had become national rowing champions while at Harvard and were now in a position to make the US Olympic rowing team and compete for gold at the Beijing Olympics later that summer. He oddly reminded Cameron of the timid kid they had first met in the dining hall back at Harvard. A socially awkward computer jock who was elated to step into their orbit, even for a moment.

  Cameron did his best to chase dark thoughts away as he took in the compliments: he tried not to remember what it had felt like to first read about Zuckerberg’s website in the Harvard Crimson. At one point, Zuckerberg’s job description posted on thefacebook.com was “Founder, Master and Commander [and] Enemy of the State.”—How about thief, Cameron thought.

  But going down that mental path wouldn’t do him any good.

  None of that really mattered now.

  Glancing back at his brother and the men sitting outside the glass fishbowl—all those lawyers furiously tending to their notepads—Cameron kept his emotions in check.

  “Mark, let’s bury the hatchet. Let’s let bygones be bygones. We’re not saying we created Facebook.”

  “At least we agree on something.”

  An attempt at humor? Cameron couldn’t be sure but plugged along anyway.

  “We’re not saying we deserve a hundred percent, we’re saying we deserve more than zero percent.”

  Zuckerberg nodded.

  “Can you really say that you would be sitting where you are today if we hadn’t approached you?”

  “I’m sitting here today because you’re suing me.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you think you mean.”

  “We approached you with our idea. We gave you unfettered access to our entire codebase. I saw that lightbulb turn on inside your head.”

  “You weren’t the first person in the world to have an idea for a social network and neither was I. Friendster and Myspace existed before Facebook, and last time I checked, Tom from Myspace isn’t suing me.”

  Exhausting, exasperating. Cameron pressed his callused fingers against the boardroom table between them. He pictured an oar being pulled through the water, stroke after stroke after stroke.

  “This could go on forever, and it’s not doing either of us any good. I’m a person, you’re a person. You’ve got a company to run, and we have an Olympic team to make.”

  “Again, something we agree on.”

  “Life is too short to keep going back and forth like this.”

  Zuckerberg paused, then pointed to the lawyers through the glass behind them.

  “They might disagree.”

  “Let’s find some common ground, shake hands, and move on with our lives to the great things we all have ahead of us.”

  Zuckerberg stared at him for a full beat. He appeared as though he was about to say something else but instead simply twitched, and again attempted the briefest of smiles.

  Then, in a manner that could only be called robotic, Zuckerberg reached across the table and offered what appeared to be an attempt at a handshake.

  Cameron felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. Was this really happening? The conversation hadn’t seemed to be getting anywhere—and yet out of the corner of his eyes he could see Zuckerberg’s lawyers behind the glass rising to their feet.

  Cameron reached out and shook Mark Zuckerberg’s hand.

  And without another word, the Facebook CEO hopped off his chair and headed for the door. Cameron had no idea what was going through his inscrutable head. Maybe Cameron had somehow reached him, and he’d decided to finally give the Winklevoss twins what they believed they deserved.

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bsp; Or maybe Zuckerberg would retreat to the conference room where he and the Facebook lawyers had been camping out during the mediation with another idea.

  “How’d it go?” Zuckerberg’s lawyer Neel Chatterjee would ask.

  “Good.”

  “Good as in … ?”

  “Good as in I’m going to fuck them in the ear.…”

  2

  DEAD IN THE WATER

  September 9, 2011.

  Five A.M.

  Rays of umber, ocher, and gold that only people who wake up ungodly early see slipped through the Technicolor trees and shone on the winding scimitar of glassy water.

  “Pull, goddamn it! Pull!”

  Every cell in Tyler’s body surged as he put his weight against the oar. He groaned as his broad shoulders opened like the wings of a bird, his frame stretching into the stroke with near perfect precision. Directly in front of him, Cameron moved in parallel, two parts of a coordinated, well-oiled machine. From afar they were a duet of smooth, controlled motion, but up close, inside the carved-out, fiberglass shell slicing across the crystal water, it was all sinew and sweat and grime, knots of muscle rising and falling beneath skin bruised and blistered and torn.

  The oars bit into the water, propelling the boat forward in sudden surges. The brothers weren’t just synchronized in form, in the mechanical motion of their muscles against the carbon fiber oars; they were physically identical. Born to work as two halves of a whole, an advantage that had helped push them from a curiosity—identical twins who rowed crew together—to a world-class team of two that could compete at the Olympic level.

  Except today, the machine wasn’t perfect. Something in the invisible gears that connected them was perceptibly off.

  Without even glancing, Tyler could sense the five other boats alongside them, gliding neck and neck like gulls in a formation toward the finish line just a few meters ahead. From the shore it would almost be imperceptible, but from his position, he could tell they were half a foot behind the closest of the other pairs … six, maybe seven inches behind the pair who had won gold in Athens in the men’s eight. That pair was trading back and forth with a pair of University of Washington alums, who had won Nationals three years in a row.

  The armada roared toward the finish line. Tyler’s eyes narrowed as he pulled with every ounce of strength he had left, but he knew, deep down, it would not be enough. Seconds later, an air horn sounded as each boat’s bow ball breached the finish line.

  The race was over.

  The twins had finished dead last.

  The inches that separated the six boats may as well have been miles.

  A crew race was a battle that was almost always decided long before those last few meters. Rowing wasn’t so much something you won, but something you managed not to lose; it was a war of breaking points. Whoever could swallow the most pain usually crossed the finish line first. And going into the well again and again was the only way to raise your tolerance for pain.

  The twins slumped over their oars, utterly exhausted. Lactic acid, a by-product of intense exertion, coursed through their muscles. Every cell in their bodies was on fire, their lungs were burning. The puddles left by their oars, the exhaust of the energy they had poured into moving their boat down the racecourse, dissipated quickly into the surface of Lake Carnegie in Princeton, New Jersey.

  They knew they should start cooling down and make their way back to the boathouse, but at the moment, they didn’t even have the energy to lift their oars, let alone their bodies, and start paddling back home.

  “It’s just one practice,” Tyler said. “Next time we’ll get it back.”

  Cameron didn’t lift his head.

  “If we bump the stroke rate up a few beats, we’d be on the right side of that finish.”

  He could tell from Cameron’s tone that the morning’s loss was weighing much heavier on him (and maybe both of them) than it should have. Certainly they had fared poorly in race pieces before. The ability to compartmentalize the bad practices, leaving them on the water, was an important skill in the sport of rowing—a skill that had allowed the twins to litigate against one of the biggest companies in the world while simultaneously training for the Olympics. At the level they were rowing, the slightest hiccup in rhythm or technique could translate to defeat, and against the sort of competitors who were training for the Olympic team, every stroke mattered. The pristine setting of Lake Carnegie, four miles of sheet-flat water in Princeton, New Jersey, that had served as the national training center for the Olympic rowing team for decades, was the rower’s version of an even playing field, which meant every practice came down to a combination of muscle, technique, training, and willpower. Victory was a matter of the horse, not the chariot.

  Lake Carnegie was literally made for rowing. Before 1902, the Princeton team had rowed on the nearby Delaware Canal, a busy waterway jammed with cargo boats and pleasure cruisers, but the rowers had grown tired of dodging freighters and Sunday sailors. In a fortuitous stroke of timing, a former coxswain and alumnus was commissioned to paint a portrait of the steel baron Andrew Carnegie, and used the time he was supposed to be concerned with brushes and oil paints to pitch the idea of creating a lake for the use of the Ivy League college’s crew team. Tickled by the idea, the financier had donated over a hundred thousand dollars, a fortune at the time, for the construction project. With the help of a handful of rowing alumni, Carnegie had secretly bought up all the land in the area, then damned off the Millstone River, moving earth and water to create the perfect rowing playground.

  It wasn’t long before the Olympic national team had recognized the value of the private, protected strip of water next to one of the most storied educational centers in the world; soon the best rowers from all over the country were being invited to train on the lake that stretched past the century-old boathouse.

  Tyler and Cameron had spent countless mornings gliding beneath the stone arch bridges that straddled the lake at its narrower points, reminiscent of the stone abutments that punctuated the snakelike Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There they had cut their rowing teeth under the legendary Harry Parker. By the year 2000, when the twins matriculated to Harvard, Parker had been coaching the Harvard men’s team for nearly forty years. Harvard oarsmen coached by Harry Parker had competed at every Olympic Games since 1964. The twins would continue this tradition by representing the United States in the men’s coxless pair at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China.

  At Harvard, the twins had been undefeated national champions. Cameron, the southpaw twin, had rowed port and sat in 6-seat of the heavyweight varsity crew, while Tyler, the righty twin, had rowed starboard and sat behind him in 5-seat. In an eight-man boat, the twins’ seats were located in the “engine room”—the term for the middle of the boat, where the biggest and most powerful rowers sat. The college newspaper sports writers referred to Cameron and Tyler as the “Twin Towers” and nicknamed their crew the “God Squad”—because some of them were devout Christians who believed in God, while the rest believed they were gods.

  The God Squad was the most famous Harvard crew since the storied “Rude and Smooth” crew of the mid-1970s, which was chronicled in David Halberstam’s book The Amateurs. This crew earned its nickname because of its smooth rowing and rude antics. Many of these larger-than-life oarsmen went on to compete in the Olympics and become wildly successful after their rowing careers. Dick Cashin, the crew’s 6-seat, became a private equity tycoon in New York City and donated the funds to build the Harry Parker Boathouse, a community boathouse open to the public and located on the Charles River upstream from Newell and Weld, the Harvard men’s and women’s boathouses.

  The twins’ high school rowing coach had given them a copy of The Amateurs during their first season when they were freshman in high school back in 1997. It was no coincidence that they ended up applying to Harvard a few years later. When they arrived at Harvard as freshmen in 2000, they hoped to one day fill the shoes of this fabled crew.
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  And fill them they did. The God Squad never lost a collegiate race. In fact, they never really had a close race. They were so fast that they went to the 2004 World Cup in Lucerne, Switzerland, and placed sixth, beating the Olympic team eight-man boats from Britain and France. After Lucerne they competed at the Henley Royal Regatta, the pinnacle of the British rowing season, an event on par with tennis at Wimbledon and horse racing at Ascot. At Henley, the God Squad defeated Cambridge University on their way to the Grand Challenge Cup finals, then raced gallantly against the Dutch Olympic team, losing by two-thirds of a boat length. A month later, the same Dutch eight-man boat went on to win Olympic Silver in the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece. This put into perspective just how fast the God Squad really was and forever immortalized them in the pantheon of collegiate rowing history.

  After the twins graduated from Harvard in 2004, they made their way from the shores of the Charles River to the banks of Lake Carnegie, which was home to the United States National Rowing team.

  Perhaps even more so than the Charles River, Carnegie was a magnificent setting. Unfortunately, this didn’t make the loss that morning any easier to swallow. To Tyler, it wasn’t just a meaningless race in another practice; the moment felt existential.

  The London Olympics were ten months away. They could train day and night, push their bodies to an extreme they’d reached before, maybe even get on form enough to medal. It would be an incredible honor, a true victory, and it wouldn’t change anything. Not who they were, not how they were viewed by the world. They were a book cover that had already been judged, and judged again. First by a court system they believed had been stacked against them from the very beginning, and then by public opinion, a popular conception and social conscience fueled by a movie that had told only enough of the story to paint them as caricatures, weighed down by how they looked and what they were supposed to represent.