After Facebook’s I.P.O., the twins’ $45 million in shares soared. Adjusted for splits, it appreciated five times and, according to the twins, went on to be worth almost $500 million. If Quinn Emanuel had taken its fee in stock, the firm would have earned upward of $100 million for six months of work.

For the foolish, batshit-crazy twins, this proved to be one of the greatest business decisions of all time—topped only, perhaps, by their choice to invest $11 million of that settlement in Bitcoin in 2013.

But back in 2008 the saga was far from over. Shortly after they’d settled, it emerged that the twins were missing critical information related to the value of the stock they had received: an internal document, known as a 409A valuation, which had been created by an independent, third-party firm. This valuation, which Facebook used to comply with I.R.S. rules and the U.S. tax code, valued the twins’ Facebook shares at a quarter of the price that Zuckerberg’s settlement offer had told them they were worth—was it another ear-fucking?

Armed with both the valuation and the knowledge of the damaging I.M.s that would eventually come out via Business Insider, the twins tried to get the case reopened. In a 2010 appeals brief, Facebook denied any misrepresentation. The twins’ effort was shot down by a California federal judge, a verdict that was later upheld by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The result wasn’t surprising; the twins were fighting Facebook, soon to be a $100 billion monster, in its own backyard. The stakes had become enormous. President Obama had visited Facebook’s headquarters after being elected in 2008—a win credited in part to Zuckerberg’s site, which Obama’s campaign had used to connect with millions of voters dubbed the “Facebook generation.” And it didn’t hurt that one of Obama’s campaign gurus was Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg’s former roommate, who had run marketing and communications for Facebook prior to joining the Obama campaign. This all culminated with Zuckerberg’s adorning the cover of Time magazine in 2010 as Person of the Year. Battling a tech colossus in California did not exactly get you favorable odds.

The Winklevoss twins believed Zuckerberg had wronged them in 2004 by stealing their idea for what became Facebook, had wronged them a second time by deep-sixing the damaging I.M.s during litigation, and had wronged them a third time by lying about Facebook’s stock valuation—by winning, they had lost.

Despite receiving stock potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, an enormous sum by any standard, the twins felt maligned. And not only that, going up against Zuckerberg in such a public fashion had taken its toll on their image in the court of public opinion. They were torn apart in the media and ridiculed by the blogosphere as spoiled and entitled brats with a nasty case of sour grapes. Whereas each time another example of Zuckerberg’s Shakespearean betrayals became public, the media seemed to look the other way.

Even Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, took a shot at them, publicly calling them “assholes” while onstage at Fortune’s 2011 Brainstorm Tech conference, hosted at the Aspen Institute. The twins’ offense? Wearing jackets and ties when they’d attended President Summers’s office hours in April 2004 to discuss Zuckerberg’s duplicitous behavior.

Summers’s public attack seemed so unfair that the twins and Narendra wrote an open letter to Summers’s successor, then Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust, expressing their concerns regarding Summers’s conduct. “It was not his failure to shake hands with the three of us upon entering his office (doing so would have required him to take his feet off his desk and stand up from his chair), nor his tenor that was most alarming, but rather his scorn for a genuine discourse on deeper ethical questions, Harvard’s Honor Code, and its applicability or lack thereof,” they wrote, going on to add, “It goes without saying that every student should feel free to bring issues forward, dress how they see fit, or express themselves without fear of prejudice or public disparagement from a fellow member of the community, much less so from a faculty member.”