TL;DR: United States tabloid television program, CBS Sunday Morning, profiled Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss through the narrative of author Ben Mezrich’s latest book, Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption. Wired Magazine editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson interviewed the men about their public Facebook movie shaming, and eventual resurrection through cryptocurrency investment savvy.

Bitcoin Billionaires Go From Facebook Villains to Crypto Heroes

Mezrich’s thesis is how perhaps famed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was the villain, bad guy while the Winklevii were in actuality maligned heroes all along. Indeed, 2010’s adaptation of The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal (a Mezrich-told saga as well) in a 2010 major motion picture (The Social Network) led to a public relations nightmare for the twins.

Cast as privileged, one dimensional young men filled with sour grapes over the sly and cunning Zuckerberg’s genius-everyman did seem to fit. At first glance, there’s a lot to hate about them: tall, great looking, rich, smart. Yuck. That they got a settlement piece of Facebook, now worth hundreds and hundreds of millions, for essentially coming up with a rough outline of what might become a corporate unicorn, only solidified for most how these guys were just lucky manipulators.

But then not too much longer after, around 2012, fresh from being effectively shut out of Silicon Valley for running afoul of Zuckerberg, the twins literally hear about Bitcoin on a Spanish beach, and decide it was too good to overlook. Their eventual decision to buy 1% of all bitcoin priced in the high single digits was another early gamble that, so far, seems to have paid off handsomely. And with Facebook set to enter the cryptocurrency payment sphere (or something like that) this week, the narrative gets juicier, as once again Zuck appears to be honing-in where the twins first tread.

The near eight minutes long segment is at least testimony to the twins’ marketing team. Snide asides by Thompson (he doesn’t own bitcoin, he insists, and wouldn’t allow his mom to either) give way to a loving portrait of the two hunks who only seem to learn from past mishaps with the likes of once golden boy himself Charlie Shrem, now a sorry footnote. The twins’ exchange, Gemini, is infomercial-ed, complete with company logo t-shirt wearing Winklevii and wispy camera sweeps of their 200 employee facilities. Heck, Thompson even demonstrates the exchange’s swanky UI on his phone, buying and selling $10 worth of BTC (he lost nearly $3 on the trade). It’s hagiography, as nothing critical of the twins is uttered (no word about their lobbying for cynical regulatory capture through the Lawsky BitLicense, for example), but it is the second Bitcoin-related segment CBS tackled in as many months … which could help pump speculative markets overall. Maybe that’s something.

DISCLOSURE: The author holds cryptocurrency as part of his financial portfolio, including BCH.

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