Member-only story
‘I Love Billionaires’: Author Ben Mezrich on the Winklevoss Twins and Writing the Cryptocurrency Narrative
In ‘Bitcoin Billionaires,’ Mezrich reinvents the Winklevoss twins as savvy tech investors
Money as a social network. That was how a stranger first pitched Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the 6’5” twins, on bitcoin at a lavish pool party in 2008. The sibling investors, who were depicted in The Social Network as uber-jocks who found themselves thwarted in their tech ambitions by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, had never heard of cryptocurrency. But they knew an opportunity when they saw one. They began buying bitcoin in 2012, when it was worth less than $10 a coin, in what proved to be an incredibly shrewd investment. When the value of a bitcoin reached more than $11,000 in 2017, the Winklevoss twins became the world’s first verified bitcoin-financed billionaires. (Bitcoin is currently trading at around $7,600.)
The story of the Winklevoss brothers’ incredible second act is the subject of Ben Mezrich’s new book, The Bitcoin Billionaires. Mezrich, who also wrote Bringing Down the House, about a group of card counters from MIT, and The Accidental Billionaires, which was adapted into The Social Network, has a talent for telling cinematic tales of wealth, sex, and opportunity. And like…
