Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, twins who made a prescient $11 million investment in bitcoin, are reportedly now billionaires, thanks to that 2013 bet. The brothers had first gained notoriety more than a decade ago when they unsuccessfully sued Facebook (
FB) CEO Marc Zuckerberg for stealing the idea that became the world's largest social network. It was the settlement from that earlier legal battle that funded their initial bitcoin investment.
According to the UK's
Telegraph newspaper, the identical twin Winklevosses are the first "bitcoin billionaires" because they purchased 10,000 bitcoins when the digital currency's price
reached a high of $1,000 in November of that year. Since then, it has surged more than 10-fold, recently trading at $11,310.
The brothers went on to be among the digital currency's most vocal proponents. They launched the Gemini exchange in 2016 and proposed an exchange-traded fund (ETF) backed by the price of bitcoin. Speaking to the Telegraph in 2016, Cameron Winklevoss proclaimed that he and his brother were long-term investors, and he noted that they haven't sold any of their stash of the cryptocurrency despite its meteoric price rise.
