After losing an epic battle with Mark Zuckerberg over ownership of Facebook and being shunned in Silicon Valley, CAMERON and TYLER WINKLEVOSS are back—this time as budding Bitcoin billionaires at the center of the future of money, the creative economy and quite possibly a new operating model for Big Tech itself.
Identical Twin billionaires Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss saunter into their empty 17th-floor offices in Manhattan’s Flatiron district wearing designer high-tops, black jeans and matching sweatshirts made by the high-end streetwear brand Heron Preston. The sweatshirts—Cameron’s is red, Tyler’s white—are emblazoned with a NASA logo, which the twins picked because it echoes the space-exploration theme behind the brand of their seven-year-old cryptocurrency trading operation, Gemini. In addition to being the Zodiac sign symbolized by twins, it was the name of NASA’s second space mission—the one just prior to Apollo 11, which put the first man on the moon.
“We actually call our employees astronauts,” Cameron says. “We’re all astronauts building on the frontier of money and the frontier of art and the frontier of finance.” Accustomed to finishing his brother’s thoughts, Tyler chimes in:“We feel like we’re on a spaceship, exploring a new frontier.”
Photographer Michael Prince and digital artist Yoshi Sodeoka collaborated to produce this 15-second rendering of Forbes magazine’s 2021 international billionaires issue cover. It is being sold at auction on Wednesday as an NFT artwork. The proceeds will go to the Committee to Protect Journalists and The International Women’s Media Foundation.
On this sunny March day, the spaceship is hitting warp speed. The price of Bitcoin is about to reach an all-time high of $58,000 (it sold for $8 in 2012 when the brothers began investing some $10 million in the digital currency), rocketing their combined net worth to $6 billion. Their latest investment, fast-growing Bitcoin lending giant Block-Fi, just announced it has raised $350 million, valuing the company at $3 billion.
And the 39-year-old brothers’ hottest venture, digital art auction platform Nifty Gateway, is basking in the glow of a sale at Christie’s, where the gavel is about to fall on the 255-year-old auction house’s first-ever sale of a nonfungible token (NFT) artwork, a one-of-a-kind computer file tracked on a digital ledger known as a blockchain. Nifty Gateway put the artist, Mike Winkelmann, who goes by Beeple, on the map through a series of “drops” starting last year. Before the day ends, Gemini’s custodial business, which houses digital assets securely, will receive a $69 million cryptocurrency payment for Beeple on behalf of Christie’s, making his “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” the third-most-expensive work sold by a living artist, after Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
Much of the world still thinks of the 6-foot-5 twins as the crew-rowing chumps played by Armie Hammer in The Social Network, the hit 2010 movie about Facebook. At Harvard, classmate Mark Zuckerberg had swiped their idea for a social networking site, building an empire with 2.8 billion worldwide users and a personal fortune now worth $97 billion. A dozen years after they settled with Zuckerberg for $65 million in Facebook stock and cash, the Winklevii, as they are widely known, have emerged as leaders of a technological movement whose core operating principle involves digitizing the records of all assets globally, decentralizing control and cutting out gatekeepers—including Facebook.
Blockchain, the technology underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is already disrupting money and banking, as giant financial firms such as PayPal, Square, JPMorgan, Fidelity and Northern Trust embrace Bitcoin and jockey for position in a future awash in digital assets. At the same time, big companies…
Read More:Revenge Of The Winklevii
