It was the last week of August, the middle of the afternoon, and Cameron was wading through a postapocalyptic moonscape. His sneakered feet raised clouds of fiery dust as he moved over the sun-hardened playa. He was wearing cargo shorts and little else; the air was so hot he could see it through his sunglasses—really, oversize goggles that would have been appropriate for either welding or skiing—the oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon molecules shimmering in swirls around his head. The temperature was somewhere between ninety and infinity, yet Cameron didn’t care; he hadn’t stopped smiling since the tiny, single-engine Cessna puddle jumper had dumped him and his brother on the makeshift landing strip at the far reaches of the impromptu desert city. The scene around him may have been postapocalyptic, but it was the friendliest apocalypse he could have imagined.
“It’s spectacular, isn’t it,” Tyler said as he stepped off of a dirt-crusted bicycle and joined Cameron on the playa. He was wearing shorts too, and some sort of Mad Max–inspired vest, with his goggles up on his head.
Tyler could have been talking about any number of things. The desert itself, 300,000 acres of flat playa and lava beds in the northern part of Nevada, surrounded by mountains and hills. Or he could have been referencing “Black Rock City,” the pop-up community that had sprung up—as it did every year at the end of August—around where they were standing, a work of art and planning and genius, laid out like a large clock, with twelve smaller clocks inside, concentric circles, each one with an equally smaller radius than the previous one, like a Russian nesting doll. Or he could have meant the thousands of camps sprouting right out of the desert floor, covering every conceivable clock position in between the edge of the largest clock and that of the smallest one, starting from 2:00 P.M. and moving clockwise all the way around to 10:00 P.M.—camps that ran from spartan tents, domes, and yurts, to elaborate, fantastical constructs that housed dozens of people. Or he could have been speaking about the art installations and sculptures springing up next to the camps—some of them camps themselves—things like pyramids or crashed UFOs or giant carcasses of retired jumbo airliners. Geometric constructs, statues, temples, polyhedrons. Or the art cars that slowly rolled around the desert clock, hundreds of Pac-Man–like organisms moving through the organized maze of camps, mutant vehicles ranging from mobile boom boxes, pirate ships, and sharks, to steam trains, hotrods, dragons, and fire-breathing octopuses. At night, some camps were lit by strings of lights or panels of LEDs, some strafed the night with flashing strobes and laser beams, while some glowed fluorescent and others possessed fire-breathing torches and fire pits. Altogether, they transformed this barren, inhospitable desert flat into a Technicolor phantasmagoria.
Or he could have been talking about The Man himself, rising up in the center of it all, towering like a humanoid skyscraper, forty feet tall, made entirely of wood, with kindling stacked by each massive foot. Eventually, The Man would be set on fire toward the end of the one-week festival, a tradition that gave this place its name and symbolized one of the main principles of the gathering: “Radical self-expression.” To many of the seventy thousand people populating the desert around Cameron, known as “Burners,” it was an annual pilgrimage or raison d’être that bordered on being religious.
And nearby to the Burning Man was the Temple, a spiritual structure that housed the “Soul” of the Man. A cathartic wooden sanctum, where people left photos and notes and inscribed messages written to themselves, to loved ones, or sometimes to no particular person at all, just anyone passing by. They contained advice, wisdom, joy, happiness, gratitude, inspiration, heartbreak, heartache, loss, trauma, pain; the entire range of deep inner emotions and experiences that cut to the core of what it meant to be a human, experiencing life on this earth with all of its vicissitudes. The Temple was one of the only places on the playa that was quiet. A place where you could hear your own thoughts in between the delicate sound of whispers, faint sobs, and human embrace. And perhaps your own tears. An emotional journey, at times overwhelming, that left you with an intense sense of gratitude and inner peace. When the Temple burned on the last day of the festival, it unlocked all of its emotional content in a release, a rebirth, so powerful, so spiritual, that it helped assuage the grief and begin the healing process, closing a chapter to begin anew.
Cameron wasn’t exactly sure what had brought Tyler and him to Burning Man that summer; a friend’s invite, an escape from East Coast humidity, pure curiosity—but he was glad they’d come. No matter who you were when you headed to that desert, the atmosphere could change you; even if the change was momentary, it was something worth experiencing.
They were staying in the “Lost Lounge,” a conglomerate of canvas, tentlike cubes stacked together, a sort of makeshift desert motel. Inside, in different cubes, there was a DJ booth, a shared kitchen, dance areas, and simple places to hang out and do whatever you felt like doing.
Located at eight o’clock on the innermost of the twelve clocks—known as Airstrip—the Lost Lounge was a fifteen-minute walk, or shorter bike ride, from where they were strolling now: the other side of the Esplanade, the vast, dusty center or face of all the clocks, where the Man himself stood, right in the middle, the shaft that anchored the imaginary clock hands of this sprawling desert sundial known as Black Rock City. For the moment, Cameron was content to wander along the edge of the Esplanade and Airstrip, stopping every once in a while to venture down the radial streets and alleys that cut across all of the clocks at fifteen- and thirty-minute intervals and explore some of the thousands of camps that covered this desert timepiece. Having nothing to do, and nowhere to be, was a large part of Burning Man’s charm.
As they walked they passed groups of other Burners doing the same thing, men and women of all ages, anywhere from late teens into their seventies, dressed—and in some cases undressed—in costumes to fit the scenery. Leather, feathers, goggles, straps, chains, boots, gloves, hats—the sort of fashion show you’d expect to see moments before the end of the world.
As Cameron continued clockwise around the Esplanade, he caught sight of another group coming toward them. A half dozen young people, mostly shirtless, in shorts, covered in dust. As they passed, one of the Burners in the group suddenly stopped and looked at Cameron and his brother.
“Excuse me, I don’t mean to interject,” he said, a little formally. “But are you the Winklevoss twins?”
A question they’d heard so many times, it had become almost background noise. The Burner had a boyish face, curly dark hair, cherubic cheeks. Cameron didn’t think he recognized the guy, but he seemed to be about Cameron and Tyler’s age, maybe a little younger, but then again, in playa garb, covered in dirt, Cameron might not have recognized Tyler if he wasn’t standing right next to him.
“We sure are,” Cameron said.
“Um, wow. Cool. I’m Dustin Moskovitz.”
If Cameron didn’t know the face, he certainly knew the name. Moskovitz had cofounded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, and had been his number two until he’d left the company in 2008 to start his own business, Asana, a software-service company that helped teams work more efficiently. Forbes had named Moskovitz the youngest self-made billionaire in history, because he was eight days younger than Mark Zuckerberg and owned more than 2 percent of Facebook.
They had attended Harvard together but had traveled in very different circles. Cameron had never met Moskovitz and wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a lineup. That said, Moskovitz had been personally named as a defendant in their lawsuit and had no doubt followed its progress, like much of the world, as it wound its way through the legal system for years. Cameron knew Moskovitz and Zuckerberg were close, and that there was a good chance he viewed him and Tyler as adversaries, maybe even mortal enemies. Maybe Moskovitz had been merely a bystander, swept up in the legal tornado, and not a party to any of duplicitous actions of Zuckerberg. Nonetheless, it was likely that he shared Zuckerberg’s version of the Facebook origin story rather than their own.
Cameron stood there, the dust swirling between him, Tyler, and Facebook’s former number two. He stared at Moskovitz, Moskovitz stared at him. And then, suddenly, Moskovitz stepped forward and hugged him.
It was a Burning Man moment. Here “radical inclusion” reigned supreme. This moment might have gone completely differently if it had happened in the real world, outside this desert realm, in New York or Silicon Valley. Would the world outside this world even allow it? Or would some force, someone, or something get in the way? No one would ever know, because it had happened here, and in this way. And for at least the brief moment of time that it took to hug it out on the playa, the past was the past—the water of discord was under the bridge.
After they’d separated, Moskovitz shook both their hands and invited the twins to a grilled cheese party at his camp the next day. As it turned out, Cameron was too busy working through his feelings to remember where the camp was located. But maybe that was for the best; as he later discovered, Zuckerberg had flown into Burning Man on a helicopter to help serve the grilled cheeses. If Cameron and Tyler had attended, who knows what would have happened? Was it even possible that they might have also hugged it out with Zuckerberg? On the playa, among the dust of the earth and the sea of humanity, among all that spirituality, love, and gratitude, could even the Winklevii and Zuckerberg have let bygones be bygones over grilled cheeses?
Well, it was a nice idea.
Cameron opened his eyes to find himself sitting behind his desk in his glass office in New York, as far from the Black Rock City desert and Burning Man and the never-ending playa as he could be. Sometimes it was hard to know why a specific memory bubbled up when it did; that hug on the Esplanade seemed like such distant history. And yet it had been simmering in the back of his mind for some time. Maybe it was because he and Tyler had founded a startup, their first since Harvard Connection/ConnectU almost a decade ago.
The idea was called Gemini—a fully regulated, fully compliant, virtual currency exchange headquartered in New York.
Once Silk Road had gone down, Mt. Gox had become Bitcoin’s biggest liability. And then, two weeks after Charlie’s arrest and the NYDFS Virtual Currency Hearings, where the twins had spoken in front of Lawsky and the regulators, Mt. Gox had collapsed. Karpeles, in a last-ditch effort, had frantically approached the twins to see if they would fund an emergency bailout of Mt. Gox. But it had already been too late—800,000 bitcoin had been looted from customers’ accounts by sophisticated hackers—a loss worth over $450 million at the time.
After the fall of Mt. Gox, the twins had become convinced that Bitcoin desperately needed a new wave of entrepreneurs and companies that could sweep away the broken pieces of that first wave—the Charlies, the Karpeleses. If there was no safe and secure place for people to buy, sell, and store virtual currency, the innovation would soon fail. Even before Mt. Gox’s collapse, Cameron and Tyler had been searching for entrepreneurs who were building the next generation of exchanges—but they hadn’t been able to find anyone who they believed was taking the right approach.
The twins believed that for an exchange to be successful, it needed four fundamental pillars seared into its DNA: licensing, compliance, security, and technology. Some entrepreneurs they talked to had the technology part right but didn’t emphasize compliance enough, while others were not focused enough on the security. There was always a corner being cut or a dangerous compromise being made. No one was embracing all four principals equally, and eventually the twins had decided that they would have to take matters into their own hands.
On January 23, 2015, Cameron had announced their plans to the world:
Today, my brother, Tyler, and I are proud to announce Gemini: a next-generation bitcoin exchange. What exactly do we mean by “next generation”? We mean a fully regulated, fully compliant, New York–based bitcoin exchange for both individuals and institutions alike. Why? Because it’s about time.…
Cameron knew it was ambitious, another big bet on a par with their original purchase of 1 percent of the new currency and their still unrealized ETF. He and Tyler had been assembling the Gemini team for more than a year. Their goal was simple: bring together the nation’s top security experts, technologists, and financial engineers to build a world-class cryptocurrency platform from the ground up with a security-first mentality. A fully regulated exchange in the heart of the old-world financial realm: New York. One that asked for permission, rather than forgiveness. They weren’t trying to hack their way around regulation; they were going to help build it. In light of how ambitious the venture was, they had named their new venture, well partially, after one of NASA’s early space programs: Gemini. The comparison to NASA’s second spaceflight project, which was meant to be a bridge from the Mercury program, which had put men into orbit, and Apollo, which put them on the moon, made sense to Cameron: if it succeeded, Gemini would be a bridge to the future of money.
But they hadn’t been thinking only of rocket ships when they’d chosen the name. Gemini was also the Latin word for “twins.” As such—and as they’d explained in their announcement—“it inherently explored the concept of duality.” The old, legacy world of money melding with a future filled with virtual currency, both intersecting on the Gemini platform.
Eight months after their announcement, on October 5, 2015, Gemini had opened its doors to the world.
Their goal was not just to build a billion-dollar company—a “Unicorn,” in Silicon Valley parlance—their goal was to build something more. A company that would last for a hundred years—what they called “Centurion.” Cameron and Tyler were playing the long game. Gemini, they often joked, was trying to be the fastest tortoise in the race.
Cameron and Tyler were not just Gemini’s founders, but they were also its investors, through Winklevoss Capital. They didn’t just have their skin in the game—they were all in, down to the bones.
Sitting in his office, Cameron wondered if the recurring memory of that moment at Burning Man had something to do with the fact that he and his brother were finally entrepreneurs once more. The first time since college, since they’d approached Mark Zuckerberg with their idea.
Did he keep coming back to that moment when he’d come face-to-face with Facebook’s number two, because he and Tyler had finally reached the point where they could move on from where they’d started? Had their second act finally eclipsed their first?
Cameron realized his brother was at the door of his office. He guessed that if Tyler knew what he was thinking, he’d have told him that he was reading into things too much. Cameron has always been the dreamier one. To Tyler, real life didn’t have first, second, or even third acts. Life was a ride down a river in a boat.
“You see it?” Tyler said, almost offhand, like it was the most meaningless question in the world.
Cameron glanced past his brother, through the open door. Winklevoss Capital, now also home to Gemini, was bustling. They were hiring so fast to keep up with Gemini’s growth and with Bitcoin’s that Cameron recognized only half of the people who populated the desks in the open area, a sea of monitors, software engineers, operational personnel, customer support representatives, and more. Although their ETF was still a dream, Gemini was humming along, and over the past year, the price of bitcoin had been enjoying a steady rise since January.
“See what?” Cameron asked.
“Look at your computer.”
Cameron shifted in his seat, then faced the screen on his desk. His eyes moved to the ever-present ticker at the bottom, and then he paused. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought it was a mistake—a zero where something else should have been, a glitch of pixels on the screen.
Bitcoin had just hit $10,000 a coin. Cameron knew there were many reasons that had led to this incredible rise: regulation around cryptocurrencies had gotten clearer, and most people didn’t believe that governments around the world were going to outlaw the new forms of money. More and better entrepreneurs had moved into the space, built more infrastructure, making it easy to buy, sell, and store bitcoin. There was a greater level of education—people had started to see that Silk Road wasn’t Bitcoin, that there was so much more to the technology.
In effect, it was akin to how the internet had started off as a niche, hard-to-use thing—and then had just proliferated over time, as infrastructure and user-friendly applications emerged, and as more entrepreneurs flooded into the space. And so bitcoin had risen, and risen and risen—and was now at $10,000.
The calculation wasn’t hard for Cameron to do in his head. As of that moment, the entire market cap of bitcoin had reached over $200 billion. Beginning in 2011, they had acquired 1 percent of that market. And since they’d started buying the virtual currency, they hadn’t sold a single bitcoin.
Cameron looked at his brother, then smiled.
“I’m six foot five, two hundred and twenty pounds, and have a billion dollars’ worth of Bitcoin,” he said. “Oh, and there’s two of me.”
His brother was ready with a line of his own:
“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars … in bitcoin.”
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss had just officially become the world’s first known Bitcoin billionaires.