Charlie leaned forward over the Plexiglas balcony, staring out at the blinking lights of a city sprawl both modern and tropical, state-of-the-art skyscrapers mingling with squat, hacienda-style buildings with arched windows and tiled roofs. Everywhere he looked, there were cranes, the accoutrements of a burgeoning economy on its way up.
It had to be well after three in the morning, and yet the city was just coming alive. Part of Charlie wanted to get back down there, among the cars and the smog and the people, the energy of the packed discotheques, cafés, and restaurants that lined what was a bona fide Red Light District. And another part of him was content to just watch it all from the balcony of his shared, two-story penthouse. After all, why go down to the party, when the party so badly wanted to come to you?
The balcony extended all the way around the corner of the building, offering nearly 360-degree views of Panama City; from the Pacific Ocean and the famous canal, to the rolling greenery rising up on the other side of the old city behind. But the view over the balcony didn’t hold a candle to the view on the balcony. He counted at least nine women—Panamanian, Colombian, Costa Rican, Mexican—mixed in among his friends. They were all stunning, and the combined effect of so many different flavors of perfume had turned into something palpable.
The girl next to Charlie was named Kitty and she seemed to be the leader of the group that had come home with them from the nightclub an hour before. A nightclub that didn’t even have a name, lodged at the end of an alley not two blocks from their apartment. Before that, they had spent the better part of the night at the Veneto Casino. Its pink stucco exterior walls and huge, garish neon sign out front would have been right at home on Fremont Street in Las Vegas.
Charlie wasn’t sure whose idea it was to move the traveling circus back to their place, and he definitely hadn’t invited the girls—Courtney wasn’t with him in Panama at the moment, but she was (and would always be) his everything. Somewhere inside, in the chef’s kitchen on the first floor of the penthouse, their butler was making empanadas; yes, a butler had come with the apartment rental. The smell of frying meat and boiled egg wafted through the open double doors leading out to where Charlie and the rest were congregated.
Charlie didn’t speak Spanish, so he couldn’t exactly follow everything she was saying as she described the part of the city where the penthouse was located. But he’d read a guidebook during the flight from JFK, and he knew that the posh district—El Cangrejo—had actually been founded by Jewish immigrants more than a half century earlier. The city still bore many clues to its original inhabitants. In fact, earlier in the day, just a few blocks over, Charlie had walked past an enormous stone statue of Albert Einstein’s head, squatting in the yard of what appeared to be an apartment building.
Since the 1950s, most of the Jews had moved out, and the neighborhood was now diverse, cosmopolitan, and so very much alive.
This sliver of Central America really was the Wild West: there didn’t seem to be any laws at all, at least laws that you had to follow. Just about everything was negotiable. Not only was prostitution perfectly legal, but Panama’s banking laws were also some of the most lax—or, one could say “innovative”—in the world. The city was rife with companies that would face much harsher scrutiny if they were located most anywhere else. Online poker companies, sports books, money-lending facilities, and now a growing number of bitcoin companies, large and small.
Charlie looked over to Ver, Erik Voorhees, and Ira, who were gathered around an open laptop, pretty much ignoring the girls. It was no surprise that Ver and Voorhees had gravitated to Panama. Its laws and mores dovetailed perfectly with their belief system. From the minute they’d stepped off the plane from New York, Voorhees had begun planning to make his stay in the Central American country permanent. Having a head of marketing living a thousand miles away, on a different continent, might not have been ideal—but in the age of Bitcoin, Charlie figured there was no real reason why they all had to be in the same physical location.
For his part, Charlie had left New York basically on a whim to come along with his friends. Since he’d gotten here, he’d avoided checking his email: he knew exactly what he’d find. Reluctantly, he moved away from the balcony and retrieved his own laptop out from under one of the lounge chairs between two tanned, bare ankles. He found a quiet spot close to where his roommates were sitting.
There they were: Cameron Winklevoss. Tyler Winklevoss. Cameron Winklevoss. Tyler Winklevoss. Multiple emails from both twins, all of them flagged as urgent.
Even their names somehow looked angry. As he started reading through their messages, he could picture them typing away, maybe in their new glass offices at Winklevoss Capital, maybe back home in Greenwich, maybe in their parents’ house in the Hamptons. Sitting across from each other as they typed, their faces would be equally livid.
To be fair, he probably should have given them some warning he was leaving town, headed to Panama. But he knew that was only part of the problem. To them, it wouldn’t just be that he was in Panama, it would also be that he was here with Voorhees and especially Ver.
Honestly, the invitation had come right when he needed it most. It wasn’t just the pitiful meeting he’d attended after the night out of partying; he knew the twins had been justified in berating him about his behavior. It was the constant phone calls, emails, the continuous surge of suggestions that weren’t really suggestions; sure, Tyler and Cameron were the primary investors in BitInstant, but did that give them the right to micromanage Charlie, like he was some sort of twelve-year-old delinquent?
There was no doubt in his mind. If it were up to the twins, by now they would have replaced him as CEO with someone in a suit, or at least a blazer that fit properly.
“Look, Charlie,” Ver said from his deck chair, as if he could read Charlie’s worried thoughts. “I think I see them rowing through the canal. Any minute now they’ll be scaling the side of the building to drag you back to New York.”
“There’s plenty of room for them to join us,” Voorhees said. “I think there’s a pull-out couch in the second-floor living room.”
Charlie was still scanning their emails. “I think I might have pushed them over the edge this time. They’re really pissed.”
“Maybe this is a good thing,” Ver said. “Maybe this is the stroke that sends them back to Greenwich.”
Lately, things had been especially heated between the twins and not just Charlie but his associates too. Tyler and Cameron had started to view Voorhees and Ira as people who were being paid like full-time employees but only working part-time—building their own projects on the side—one of which was a Bitcoin gambling site. The twins believed BitInstant required full-time dedicated employees, not people with one foot in, one foot out. That was how they approached everything, and Charlie could understand it: you didn’t make the Olympics by being a part-timer.
Ver, on the other hand, thought Erik’s and Ira’s side hustles were none of the twins’ business—whatever they were building would only further the overall ecosystem and BitInstant along with it; but it was obvious, Ver’s disagreement with the twins went much deeper than business. As Bitcoin had grown, Ver had become more and more vocal about his beliefs—you either agreed with them, or you were the enemy.
Charlie started to write a reply to one of the angry emails, then paused, because he wasn’t sure there was anything he could write that would make things better, or calm Cameron and Tyler down. He knew they needed to try and work this out face-to-face. And that was part of the reason he had fled to Panama. He had known an especially difficult encounter with the twins was on the horizon.
“Can’t you see where this is heading?” Ver said. “They just want to get you in bed with the bankers and regulators.”
“They want Bitcoin to succeed,” Charlie said. “They just have a different view of how we’re going to get there.”
“If you say so,” Ver said. “Sometimes it’s hard to know who are the barbarians, and who are guarding the gates.”
Philosophical battles aside, the more successful BitInstant was becoming, the unhappier the twins were getting with how Charlie was running the company. They’d told him he needed to stop traveling, stop partying, be in New York tending to the business. But what they didn’t appreciate was that BitInstant was his ticket out into the wide, wide world and all of its parties; he wasn’t going to be chained to a desk in New York. Sure, the company had its issues, but it was still doing massive business. They just needed to let him continue doing what he was doing. No need to fix what was already working.
Charlie knew he needed to sit down with the twins and offer up a new strategy going forward. One thing that was important to discuss was BitInstant’s relationship with the payment software that Voorhees and Ira had been developing, and which BitInstant was currently using to process its transactions. Something the twins didn’t yet know but that Charlie needed to figure out a way to tell them was that, well, the software was actually not the intellectual property of BitInstant—but was instead owned, outright, by Voorhees and Ira, because they had developed it, apart from their duties at BitInstant. In light of that fact, maybe from the twins’ point of view it wouldn’t be ideal, but Charlie had come up with a plan to pay Voorhees and Ira with some of his BitInstant shares, so that BitInstant could continue to use their software—problem solved. All the twins had to do was sign off on it. Voorhees had even written up a business plan explaining everything, something he called the “United Front.”
Once they were all in one room together, they could come to an understanding, a meeting of the minds, and together grow BitInstant into the behemoth they had all imagined from the beginning.
Ver had another idea of the way things should be. He felt BitInstant should relocate here, in Panama. “In Panama, they aren’t locking anyone up for being adults and making adult decisions for themselves” was his refrain. It was a view shared increasingly by Voorhees and also expounded by another friend who had joined them in Panana City, a budding Bitcoin mogul named Trace Mayer, as much of an anarcho-capitalist as any of them. Mayer had been involved in crypto from the early days and believed, like Ver, that government wasn’t necessary in finance, that financial incentives alone were enough to help guide and govern human nature toward positive outcomes.
The three of them had made some good points; the constant barrage of philosophy had maybe even caused a shift in Charlie’s own thinking. For example, the continuing issue involving BTCKing, still one of the company’s biggest customers: after initially banishing and admonishing the bitcoin reseller, Charlie had privately assured him he was welcome back. And since then, BTCKing had returned in full force. Over the past year he had done an enormous amount of volume; looking at his list of transactions, Charlie could see that the anonymous customer had turned over about $900,000 already, buying bitcoin at a steady clip—but strategizing his purchases in a way that seemed to obscure the volume of his trades. Gareth, usually silent on matters like this, had grown concerned from Wales, believing that such huge volumes from the reseller meant only one thing: BTCKing was buying bitcoin to sell to people wanting to shop on places like Silk Road.
“He has not broken any law and Silk Road itself is not illegal,” Charlie had emailed Gareth. “We also don’t have any rules against resellers. We make good profit from him.”
Obviously, this email had not been enough to assuage Gareth’s concerns. Right there on the balcony Charlie saw in his in-box another missive from his business partner, worrying that BTCKing was pushing the boundaries of what was legal.
“So many of his transactions smell like fraud or money laundering,” Gareth’s email read.
Sitting on the balcony, with the smell of empanadas in the air, Ver and Voorhees going on about how the world should work, the twins emailing him how the world actually did work, the imagery of barbarians at the gates and girls in miniskirts dancing in his head, Charlie reached down and shot off a single, succinct answer to Gareth.
“Cool.”
And then he closed his laptop and tried to forget his problems, if only for a night. Running off to Panama felt good, and liberating, but he knew the feelings couldn’t last. Soon he’d have to head back to New York, face the twins, and offer them Voorhees’s United Front. He had to find a way to keep everyone happy.
Either that, or he’d be right back in Panama, looking for a permanent place to stay.
No matter what happened, one thing was for sure. There was one place where Charlie Shrem wasn’t going to end up: back in his mother’s basement.