Anybody who has watched “The Social Network” must be familiar with the Winklevoss twins – Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, and their feud with Mark Zuckerberg.
So, what happened later? Who is Cameron Winklevoss? What more has he achieved than the millions he received as the settlement money? What is his current status? Find answers to all such intriguing questions by reading the article below.
Academic Background
One of the ‘Bitcoin Billionaires’, Cameron Winklevoss was not only an athlete but was a child prodigy who showed an interest in the business from when he was a child, when he built a web page company at 13 years old, with his twin brother.
Cameron attended Greenwich Country Day School in the beginning, and later, earned his high school diploma from Brunswick School.
After high school, he secured admission to Harvard University for his undergraduate studies. He majored in Economics and graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2004.
He enrolled in Said Business School of the University of Oxford in 2009 and graduated in 2010 with a Master’s in Business Administration.
Cameron Winklevoss- Career
As mentioned, Cameron always kept an entrepreneurial spirit right from the beginning. From his HTML-based web page company at the age of 13 to the ones he built from the Facebook settlement money, he has proven himself to be a great businessman of the present.
He co-founded different clubs, both in high school and at Harvard, including the famous Porcellian Club and the Hasty Pudding Club.
He is also a rower who participated in the Beijing 2008 Olympics with his twin brother Tyler Winklevoss.
He took an interest in the sport while in high school and was a part of the rowing team at Harvard University and Oxford University.
ConnectU, the forerunner of Facebook was the first serious venture they had been a part of, while at Harvard.
They proposed the idea to one of their classmates Divya Narendra, who helped them develop it to some extent.
Originally known as Harvard Connection, the college social networking internet site, meant to create a network of friends within the campus, later expanded its horizons when they asked Mark Zuckerberg to join the team.
In 2012, Cameron co-founded Winklevoss Capital Management with Tyler Winklevoss. A year later, in 2013, they launched another venture Gemini, a cryptocurrency exchange and custodian bank, where Cameron was appointed as the President and Tyler as the CEO of the company.
The ‘Facebook Feud’
Winklevosses sued Zuckerberg when he broke the oral agreement they had on developing the program.
Although they settled for $59 million the first time, Cameron and Tyler decided to move forward with another lawsuit asking for more.
The lawsuit that came to trial in 2011 was ruled in favor of Zuckerberg, and even with them losing the legal battle they acquired $6 more million from Zuckerberg, amassing a total of $65 million in settlement.
Out of this $65 million, they invested $11 million in Bitcoin when it was priced at 4120 per coin. As the Bitcoin price rose to $10,000 in 2017, their investment grew up to a whopping amount of $1.3 billion.
Ben Mezrich, who authored the famous book “The Accidental Billionaires” also wrote about the Twins and their success story in another book “Bitcoin Billionaires” in 2019.
Winklevoss Capital Management and Gemini
Winklevoss Capital Management was founded in 2012, headquartered in New York. The company invests in businesses of various sizes and asset classes like early-stage startups, seed funding, and infrastructure.
Thus venture capital firm makes early-stage investments and provide a full-service approach to a select number of companies specializing in software, commercial, and retail services.
Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange platform launched a year later, is also based in New York, and went live in 2015.
It is the first licensed Ethereum exchange in the United States which later opened branches in Europe, including the ones opened in Ireland in 2023 and in France in 2024.
Conclusion
Cameron Winklevoss, in conclusion, is the one, along with his brother, who came up with one of the most revolutionary ideas of all time.
Being an Olympian, he has also proven himself in fields other than business. Presently, Cameron Winklevoss is a billionaire with a net worth of $2.7 billion, the same as his brother, which takes their combined net worth to an amount of 5.4 billion US Dollars.
Both of them are still investing in cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, hoping to grow their business, and learning from their own success with Bitcoin.
