July 2012.
Three A.M.
Ibiza.
A Mediterranean party island ninety miles off the coast of Spain.
When you’re six foot five, 220 pounds, and there are two of you, you can’t just curl up and disappear …
Tyler used his oversize shoulders to push his way through the middle of the crowded dance floor, lowering his head every few minutes to dodge half-naked acrobats swinging from rubber cords attached to the ceiling. The music was so loud Tyler could feel it in his bones, a throb of electronica that seemed to come right out of the ground. Along with the acrobats, giant neon cherries bobbed down over the mob of beautiful people that surrounded him, and every few minutes he had to shield his eyes against pinwheels of brightly colored laser lights playing across the undulating revelers. The crowd was young and lithe and perfect, but Tyler wasn’t looking to meet anyone tonight and did his best to resist eye contact when he wasn’t shielding himself from the retina-burning lasers. At the moment, he wanted nothing more than to be anonymous. As if that was even possible; at thirty, Tyler hadn’t been anonymous for as long as he could remember.
To be fair, this hedonistic dance floor lodged along the coast of one of the most beautiful party islands in the world wasn’t the sort of place you went to blend in; Pacha nightclub, a former “finca”—Spanish ranch—turned disco—had grown into the premier stomping ground of the European elite, as well as a decadent playground for Hollywood royalty. Young people from all over the world descended on the club, famous for its multiple dance floors, multimillion-dollar sound system, VIP rooms, and celebrity DJs. In fact, that very night’s party was called “F@@k Me I’m Famous”; on the way to his and his brother’s VIP table, he’d passed Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, and Paris Hilton. And even Hilton had stared at him as he’d passed by. He’d done his best to pretend not to notice.
“Well, this is sufficiently insane.”
Tyler stumbled through the lasers and the crowd toward the voice, and nearly ran right into himself. Cameron grinned, giving him a facetious thumbs-up. Cameron was wearing a ridiculous lei made of flowers and bright red cherries around his neck. There was also a fleck of foam on his cheek, the remains of another party going on next door—where, Tyler assumed, the dance floor was periodically flooded with white bubbles. Wonderful, he thought. I guess it could be worse. I could be miserable and covered in foam.
Now that he was with Cameron, Tyler felt even more conspicuous. When you were an identical twin, of course you got noticed; in high school, it had mostly been affable curiosity. Not only did they look the same, but they had also been rowers who had been training together since freshman year of high school, and pretty much everyone in Greenwich, Connecticut, knew who they were. At Harvard, it was much the same: they were big names on campus, varsity athletes who were also prominent members of the Porcellian Club, the most elite of the final clubs, a place that had groomed presidents and kings.
“What the hell are we doing here?” Tyler finally responded as his brother surveyed the crowd around them.
“Having fun, I think.”
A glow-in-the-dark beach ball bounced perilously close to Cameron’s head, then continued on its haphazard journey across the top of the crowd.
“Do I look like I’m having fun?”
“You could try the foam party,” Cameron said. “But don’t swallow any. I’m pretty sure that’s how you get Legionnaires’ disease.”
Tyler pointed toward a bar at the far end of the hall, draped in women wearing bandoliers of glowing test-tube shots. Although alcohol seemed almost redundant in a place built on such sensory overload, Tyler figured it was the appropriate way to end their evening.
It felt strange, being on vacation. He and his brother hadn’t taken a real vacation in their entire lives. Usually free time had meant training; after they’d graduated from college, they had trained six hours per day, six days per week, fifty weeks per year—taking only two weeks off to recharge after each season.
But that was over now; they weren’t competitive rowers anymore. Likewise, apparently, they weren’t investors either. After their meeting at the Oasis, after Jake had gone off script and told them the real reason why they hadn’t been able to make any headway in their quest to become Silicon Valley venture capitalists, they had retreated back to New York. It seemed completely absurd; nobody would take their money, because everyone’s endgame was the same. Facebook had become this huge vacuum, sucking up every entrepreneurial dream in the area, and that meant Tyler and Cameron were poison. They had a last name that nobody dared put on their cap tables, no matter how badly they needed cash. Winklevoss money was the kiss of death.
Tyler had thought they’d hit rock bottom before, but they had dived even lower. Back in New York, taking stock of the situation, they had tried to figure out what to do next.
Simply taking their settlement, no matter how much it was, and walking away wasn’t a possibility. Maybe Eduardo Saverin, the other Facebook castaway who had successfully settled for much more than Tyler and Cameron—reportedly billions—could take the money and run, but they couldn’t; it just wasn’t in their DNA. Saverin was rumored to be living a high life in Singapore—but Tyler and his brother felt they were cut from a different cloth.
Even so, they had to face reality. They refused to give up, but maybe they needed to recharge, reset, and find a new path forward. It had been Cameron’s idea to try to do that in Ibiza. Tyler had regretted the decision from the moment they’d gotten on the plane. They were single, young, and enjoyed a good party, but they had always had a plan. It was hard for Tyler to adjust to living in the moment.
He was halfway to the bar, staring at those evil-looking test-tubes, already thinking about hopping the earliest flight back to the States, when a stranger caught his arm, stopping him with a grin and a heavy Brooklyn accent.
“Hey, are you the Winklevii?”
It was a nickname that had been given to them in high school and later immortalized by the movie, one that had stuck in the press.
“We’re actually on our way out,” Tyler tried, but the guy wasn’t going to give up so easily. Tyler looked at him: young, maybe early thirties, muscled and compact, pectorals pressing out against an open, short-sleeve shirt. He had wild eyes and a tightly shaved head, but his smile seemed friendly enough.
“I need to talk to you about something. Something important. Revolutionary, really.”
Cameron had caught up and seemed more amused by the man’s aggressive approach than Tyler was. Cameron was like that, sometimes. Tyler didn’t suffer fools, but sometimes Cameron felt the fools were the most fun to hang out with. In Ibiza, that was probably truer than in most places.
“We’ve already taken part in a revolution. It didn’t work out that great for us. But thanks anyway.”
“Facebook?” the guy said. “Facebook isn’t the revolution anymore. Facebook is the Establishment.”
Sounded crazy, but Tyler knew it was true. What had started as a revolutionary idea, putting people’s real-life social networks online, upending the way people met one another and communicated and shared, had once been new, almost indie and rebellious. But in the few years that had passed, even in the months since that meeting at the Oasis, Facebook had come to dominate the internet, sucking the oxygen out of the Valley, corralling massive amounts of data and monetizing information in such a way that for many, Facebook often seemed more Big Brother than Robin Hood.
“So what do you have in mind?” Tyler asked. “Another social network?”
The man smiled again, then did something truly confusing. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a U.S. dollar bill.
“Hell yeah, man. The oldest social network on Earth.”