Almost two weeks later, the travesty of the Abercrom meeting fading into a bad memory, Tyler sat in a Starbucks, watching the crowds of tourists and Manhattanites moving along Eighth Street through the window. It was unusual for him to choose such a visible table where he’d be on display, but the place was crowded for 11:00 A.M. on a Tuesday; then again, it was Astor Place, one of the liveliest spots in the city, smack in the middle of the East Village and a stone’s throw away from NYU. Tyler had chosen the table, but not the Starbucks itself. He searched the crowd outside for any sign of their quarry.
“There he is,” Cameron said, pointing in the direction of a dapper man moving toward them through the traffic jam of coffee addicts.
Tall, hair flecked with silver, chiseled facial structure above a criminally square jaw, wearing what appeared to be a Savile Row suit and an ascot tied around his neck: the guy looked like he’d just stepped out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Certainly from a different era, and only as he got closer could Tyler make out the lines around his eyes, the cellular log of the psychic distance he’d traveled in his fifty-odd years.
“Lads,” he said, taking the seat Cameron offered him, then smiling at the pastries and drinks spread out across the table. “Quite the buffet you’ve set up. I hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long.”
“Just got here ourselves,” Tyler fibbed.
Matthew Mellon II was the sort of guy you didn’t mind waiting around for. He descended from two of the most prominent financial families in the country: on his father’s side, Judge Thomas Mellon had founded Mellon Bank in 1869, once one of the largest banks in the world, which in 2006 had merged with the Bank of New York, the oldest company in the United States, to become Bank of New York Mellon. On his mother’s side, he was a direct descendent of Anthony Joseph Drexel, the founder of Drexel Burnham Lambert, a Wall Street investment bank created in 1935 that had gone bankrupt fifty-five years later, in 1990, following the indictment of its rainmaker Michael Milken, dubbed the Junk Bond King.
So Mellon had been born to banking royalty—and with that came all the ups and downs one would imagine. His father had killed himself when Matthew was in college at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. During his senior year, the younger Mellon had inherited $25 million at the age of twenty-one—and promptly bought himself a six-bedroom apartment off campus, a red Ferrari, and a black Porsche.
After graduating, he’d decided to cut his own path and had moved to Los Angeles. He’d chased careers in acting, modeling, and fashion before becoming an entrepreneur. Like his father, he suffered from bipolar disorder and had fought public battles with various addictions. Despite his struggles, he was one of the most charming, creative business thinkers in the country and, most importantly, one of the most open-minded. He’d cofounded Jimmy Choo, a high-fashion shoe company, with his ex-wife Tamara Mellon, whom he’d met at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. In 2017, Jimmy Choo was bought for over a billion dollars by Michael Kors Holdings. Few people in the world understood the cross-section of the finance, fashion, entertainment, and politics better than Matthew Mellon II.
Mellon fit perfectly into Tyler and Cameron’s ongoing Bitcoin tour. Although they usually met with institutions like hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, family offices, and other financial companies, they’d decided to expand their outreach leading up to the Bitcoin 2013 conference to anyone interesting enough, and interested enough, to take their calls.
It was a strategy that had landed them in front of some pretty spectacular people. Only days earlier, they’d dined with Richard Branson, the Virgin billionaire, at the Soho Beach House in Miami. At the dinner table, they’d used some of their bitcoin to prepurchase $250,000 tickets on Branson’s Virgin Galactic, a suborbital rocket cruise. With only a few taps on their iPhones, Tyler and Cameron had become future astronauts, numbers 700 and 701.
Branson had already gotten involved in Bitcoin by investing in a company called Bitpay, which helped retailers and other merchants accept bitcoin as payment. After reading the front-page article in the New York Times about the twins’ swan dive into bitcoin, the head of Branson’s “astronaut relations” team had reached them through a mutual friend. He’d recognized the potential PR value of connecting with the twins and seeing if they might be interested in purchasing tickets to space with bitcoin through BitPay, which had led to that dinner. During dinner, Branson had explained that before they went on their suborbital journey, they would have to spend a week at astronaut school in the Mojave Desert—training for space, which hopefully wouldn’t be quite as strenuous as training for the Olympics.
But Tyler knew that the sit-down with Mellon was different from many of the meetings that had come before. Mellon was not there to learn; he was there to confirm. His excitement and conviction reminded Tyler of how he and his brother had felt in the days leading up to their own headfirst plunge into the new economy.
“Here’s the deal,” Mellon said, once they’d exchanged pleasantries and a few stories about people they knew in common. “I’ve done a lot of reading since we connected over email, and I’m more than intrigued. I think you boys are onto something. I think you’ve found a rocket ship.” He paused. “My problem is, I don’t know how to get on.” Mellon hadn’t reached out because he needed their knowledge, or a crash course on Bitcoin; he needed their access—more specifically, a safe and secure way to buy himself a seat on their rocket ship, just like they’d bought theirs on Branson’s.
Cameron and Tyler immediately agreed to help Matthew solve his Bitcoin problem. They also realized the significance of the request. If a man like Mellon—a scion of American banking royalty, literally a descendant of the people who created the banking system in the first place—had trouble getting access to Bitcoin, well then Bitcoin still had major kinks to work out.
Following coffee, the twins facilitated Mellon’s request by promising to introduce him to Charlie—a risk after the unbearable meeting with RRE, but one they’d had no choice but to accept. Unlike the many business moguls they’d met on their road trip, Mellon was ready to buy, and buy big. And he—and everyone else who followed the twins into the pool—was about to do very well.
“My family and friends are going to think I’ve gone crazy,” Mellon said, grinning. “And that’s saying a lot.”
“Crazy is a relative thing,” Tyler said.
“You could just start small by buying a handful of coins,” Cameron said. “Watch the market and build a position over time.”
“That’s not the way I approach things. I’m an all-or-nothing kind of guy.”
It made sense, especially in the context of Bitcoin. It was like this bug—you either caught it, or you didn’t. Once you were hooked, you were hooked for good. No matter how many people called it a Ponzi scheme or a tulip bubble, you weren’t going to be swayed.
“Then buy as much bitcoin as you’d like,” Tyler said.
“I want you to know that I’m pro–Wall Street, pro-business, pro-banking, pro-America,” Mellon said. “And I think that’s exactly where Bitcoin should live.”
Mellon was a believer, but he was a believer cast in their image, not Ver’s or Voorhees’s. He knew that Bitcoin had to find its place within the financial framework that already existed. Facebook didn’t bring down the internet, it had just pushed the internet in a direction that worked for Facebook.
As far as the twins were concerned, getting the Bitcoin story out there was only the first step in the journey. Getting people into Bitcoin was the next; it wasn’t a coincidence that they were spending most of their time discussing Bitcoin in New York, which was ground zero of the world’s financial system—where it all began. In 1792, twenty-four stockbrokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement under a buttonwood tree located outside 68 Wall Street, creating the New York Stock Exchange.
No matter what the ideologues believed, no matter how much they brayed about bringing down banks and governments, the twins knew that if Bitcoin was going to succeed, Wall Street was going to have to get involved.
After Mellon was off, blending into the foot traffic on Astor Place, Tyler turned back to his brother.
“Let’s get Charlie on the phone,” Tyler said.
Although they had reservations about having Charlie broker a deal for Mellon, the alternative was to send him to Mt. Gox, which posed a whole different set of risks that were potentially even worse than their boy wonder CEO. In any event, Charlie should be able to help Mellon buy a meaningful amount of bitcoin, just the same way he had helped them.
Cameron dialed the number, waited, made a face.
“What now?” Tyler asked.
“He’s not there.”
“What else is new,” Tyler said, sarcastically.
“No, I mean I’m getting an international ring tone.”
“What?”
“He’s got to be out of the country.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
The kid had left town without telling them? Their CEO?
“Where the hell is he? Where did he get the idea that this was okay? He has a business to run.”
“I’ll give you one guess.”