Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story Of Genius, Betrayal And Redemption

IN 2009, AUTHOR BEN MEZRICH WROTE A book named The Accidental Billionaires, chronicling the unholy birth of Facebook, the rise of Mark Zuckerberg, and the fall – well, the stumble – of Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the identical twins who believed that Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for the social network from them.

- Tom Eaton

Mezrich’s newest book is also about billionaires, but not accidental ones, you hear? It’s very important that you understand that Tyler and Cameron were millionaires but now they’re billionaires – nine zeroes, not six – and they did it all by themselves, except for a bunch of other people. Also, they might be geniuses, and they were betrayed, but they’ve found redemption. Got it? Billionaires. Genius. Betrayal. Redemption.

Just to be safe, Mezrich has put all of those in the title: Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption. But this book’s real title, booming off every page of this entertaining but entirely transparent bit of literary fluffing, is really “Nyah Nyah Nyah, We Didn’t Need Stupid Facebook Anyway, Mark. Yeah, Mark, How’d You Like Us Now, You Nerdy Poo-Face?”

Of course, I’m not suggesting that this book was commissioned by two ultracompetitive billionaires with badly stung egos, or that they paid for the tidal wave of publicity that has launched it around the world. The super-rich doesn’t operate like that, now do they?

Still, it is palpably obvious that while this account of What The Twins Did Next sells itself as a fast-paced tech thriller, it is, in fact, a very long letter from two very jilted lovers.

Indeed, the author says as much on the very first page, where he opens with a quote from Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo: “Moral wounds have this peculiarity – they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open to the heart.”