Showing posts with label Twins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twins. Show all posts

1/7/11

Twins' Facebook Fight Rages On

, recently told portions of their story in a “60 Minutes” interview for CBS. They grew up in affluence in Greenwich, Conn., were varsity rowers at Harvard and competed in the Summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008. They now live here in San Diego, where they are training for the 2012 London Olympics.

They are as physically striking and imposing as they appeared in the film, “The Social Network, where they were portrayed by one actor, Armie Hammer. They are 6-foot-5 , and their frames are lean and muscular, shaped by years of rowing.

For the interview, they wore hoodies and jeans, and only the variation in the hoodies — one zippered with a Ron Jon Surf Shop emblem, one a pullover with a Quicksilver logo — helped to tell them apart.

As they talked about the Facebook case, no detail was too small to omit, from where they first met Mr. Zuckerberg (the Kirkland House dining room) to the layout of Mr. Zuckerberg’s dorm room, to the content of the e-mails he had sent them after they asked him to do computer programming for a Web site called Harvard Connection. They recited arcane facts about the valuation of private companies and even quoted from the Securities Act of 1934, which they say Facebook violated when it drew up the settlement.

In addition to a bigger payday, the twins say they want a court to reconsider their original claims about Facebook’s founding, pointing to instant messages on the subject sent by Mr. Zuckerberg to various friends. The messages have come to light since the brothers signed the deal. But they say Facebook executives and board members have known about the messages since 2006, and played dirty by concealing them when they negotiated the settlement.

“If you take all those documents, it is a dramatically different picture,” Tyler Winklevoss said.

Facebook declined to comment on the messages. In prior interviews, Mr. Zuckerberg said he had regretted sending some of them.


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12/20/10

Suing Facebook Twins... Get Sued Themselves

0" target=external>Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the 29-year-old twin Harvard graduates, Olympic rowers and multimillionaire entrepreneurs, make no secret of their belief that Facebook founder and former colleague Mark Zuckerberg swindled them out of a fortune.

Despite taking a reported $65 million from the billionaire in a 2008 legal settlement, the twins are chasing a bigger legal payout from a partnership they say they forged with Facebook's "toddler CEO" when the three were students at Harvard.

In a recent interview with CBS' "60 Minutes," the twins said Zuckerberg was their "teammate" and "partner" who betrayed them.

"I'm not sure anybody can quite put themselves in our shoes and understand what it must have felt like to start an idea in 2002, to approach a fellow student in 2004, to have it stolen, sabotaged, ripped off," one of the Winklevoss brothers said in the interview.

But Wayne Chang said he knows exactly what it feels like to be cheated by a partner, because, he said, the Winklevoss brothers did the same to him.

"They pretty much treated me the way they say Facebook treated them," said the 27-year-old entrepreneur. "I got backstabbed."

Last December, in a complaint filed with the Superior Court in Suffolk, Mass., Chang claimed he is owed a part of the Winklevoss' settlement money from Facebook because his Web company had merged with the brothers' social network ConnectU to create the Winklevoss Chang Group.

And he's going after a piece of the $65 million. Chang said because the Facebook litigation was a shared asset of the company, he said he is entitled to a piece of the Facebook settlement. The Winklevosses filed a motion to dismiss the complaint, which Chang has formally opposed. A January hearing is scheduled regarding the motion to dismiss, Chang said.

"I just want what was rightfully mine," he said. "I just want to go for my share of the company, my share of the partnership."

In addition to naming the Winklevoss brothers, Chang's suit names their father, Howard Winklevoss; Divya Narender, another ConnectU partner; ConnectU Inc. and the law firm that represented them in the suit against Facebook, Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner LLP.

He sues the Winklevosses and Narender for a number of claims, including breach of contract, breach of partnership and breach of covenant of good faith and fair dealing.

Lawyers for the Winklevosses and Narender did not respond to phone calls from ABCNews.com Friday afternoon and Monday morning asking for comment. Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner LLP declined to comment for this story.


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