SINGAPORE: best known for suing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss now become the world’s first Bitcoin billionaires.
According to the Telegraph, the 36-year-old brothers in 2009 accused Zuckerberg stealing the idea for the social networking site and sued.
The former Harvard classmates lost their case against the Facebook CEO and received a settlement valued at more than US$65 million.
The identical twins used some of that money (A$11 million) to invest in the controversial asset Bitcoin more than four years ago.
The $11m investment, however, has since ballooned by almost 10,000 per cent after last week’s price surge making it the first billion-dollar return made by a cryptocurrency investor.
Winklevoss twins reportedly described the cryptocurrency as “better than gold”.
“We wanted to build an exchange that was similar to Nasdaq or NYSE for digital currency,” Tyler told the Financial Times in an interview. “We wanted something that both Wall Street and Main Street felt comfortable with.”