Blacklisted by Mark Zuckerberg, They Became Tech Billionaires Anyway

It’s hard to make it in Silicon Valley when every startup is afraid to take your money.

“Your dollars may be green,” one young startup CEO named Jake told twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. “But they’re marked.”

As he explained, their 2011 meeting in Silicon Valley might as well have been taking place in Facebook’s cafeteria, and these twin brothers happened to be the two men Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg hated most in the world.

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They had tens of millions of dollars that they were eager to invest in the next big thing, but Zuckerberg’s shadow fell over all of Silicon Valley.

For the millionaire twins, the meeting was a familiar letdown. They had approached a handful of promising startups, always with the same outcome.

Sometimes, they would appear to be near a deal, only for a last-minute cancellation from yet another CEO who feared Zuckerberg’s wrath.

“You should be glad this place will even serve you a hamburger,” Jake told the Winklevosses.

The Winklevoss twins won $20 million in cash and tens of millions of dollars worth of Facebook stock in a settlement with Zuckerberg.

But the victory effectively banished them from Silicon Valley, so they turned to an opportunity in the unlikeliest of places.

After hearing about Bitcoin in a chance encounter in Ibiza, Spain, in the summer of 2012, they began researching the technology and talking to its earliest adopters.

Then they poured money into it — sometimes as much as $500,000 a week. At the time, they were the biggest buyers in the world.

Or as Bitcoin pioneer Charlie Shrem, founder of a firm that once handled 30% of all Bitcoin transactions, put it: “The twins were … whales.”

The Winklevoss twins poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Bitcoin when it was trading at $10 to $20 per coin. It worked out well for them.

They’re billionaires, thanks to the revolutionary technology that was just taking off when they heard about it in 2012.

A New Wave of Investing Whales

You may think it’s impossible to hear about nascent, explosive opportunities like Bitcoin unless you’re hanging out with high rollers in Ibiza or other extravagant gatherings of elites.

But since the Winkelvoss’s chance encounter in 2012, the investing rule book has been rewritten. You no longer have to have a net worth of $1 million or be a company insider to get in on the ground floor of potentially explosive, preinitial public offering companies.

In fact, Benzinga is tracking one opportunity for regular Americans to invest alongside some of Silicon Valley’s most storied venture capitalists.

See more on startup investing from Benzinga.

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