From the Life-Is-Unfair Files: You’re Welcome, Winklevii. Love, Zuck.
Persistence — even if it is the whiny, likely undeserved, lunkheaded legal version of it — certainly pays off.
But you have to marvel at the bizarre karma going on, given that my favorite matching pair of digital ottomans, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, are poised to collect up to $300 million from the shares they got in a settlement with Facebook and its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of the social networking giant.
That’s right, folks, the rich do get richer, especially if they pursue their case well past the point of shame.
It’s not clear how many of the 1.2 million shares the Winklevii still have from the settlement they got in 2008, since they wrangled with their own lawyers over it, and the stock has also split.
But let’s assume the Olympic rowers kept a chunk, which will be worth a lot of gold-plated oars if Facebook reaches the upward of $80 billion valuation it is expected to in its upcoming initial public offering.
Facebook filed its long-expected IPO earlier this week.
And here’s a lovely tweet about the IPO from Cameron Winklevoss, who is looking very fetching on his Twitter page, even if it is perhaps about time to lose the rower meme image thing, given he’s on the closer side of 30 years old.
We r excited 4the #FacebookIPO + wish the company + all involved the very best,an amazing accomplishment! cc @tylerwinklevoss @DivyaNarendra
— Cameron Winklevoss (@winklevoss) February 2, 2012
He sent it to his twin brother, Tyler, and also to Divya Narendra, their other partner in the ill-fated ConnectU service.
Without going into all the well-gone-over deets (go see the Aaron Sorkin-penned movie and believe about 26 percent of it), ConnectU was the Harvard University dating site that Zuckerberg allegedly submarined in order to start Facebook.
Well, presumably water under bridge — unless you are talking about the perpetually disgruntled Winklevii.
At the time they finally dropped their seven-year fraud lawsuit this past summer, they then reopened to a different one then pending.
“The Social Network 2: The Overly Compensated Vii Strike Back,” anyone?
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