Story of the Winklevoss twins' Bitcoin journey to Little, Brown

Little, Brown is to publish Bitcoin Billionaires about twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss who invested heavily in the cryptocurrency.

Richard Beswick, publishing director at Little, Brown has bought Ben Mezrich’s new book from Simon Trewin at William Morris Endeavor. It will be published simultaneously in the UK and US next spring.

Spanning the infamous Silk Road website to the halls of the US Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington to Facebook HQ, Bitcoin Billionaires takes the reader “on a wild and surprising ride while shining a bright light on an economic event that continues to baffle the average reader”. 

The Winklevoss brothers settled with Mark Zuckerberg in 2008, following a lawsuit in which they alleged he had stolen the idea for Facebook from them. They planned to set up as a venture capital fund in Silicon Valley but “quickly discovered that no one would take their money, for fear of alienating their nemesis” according to a Little Brown spokesperson.

“Quite by accident, while nursing their wounds in Ibiza, they stumbled into a shady character who pointed out to them that Facebook, ironically, was now the establishment,” the spokesperson said. “If they wanted to be disrupters and make a true killing they needed to get in on the ground floor of a brand new idea: cryptocurrency. They started buying Bitcoin when it was $6 a coin - it is now trading at over $7000 a coin.” On 26th November 2017, the twins became the first Bitcoin billionaires. 

Mezrich is best-known for Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students who Took Vegas for Millions and his 2009 title The Accidental Billionaires (both published by Arrow) which was adapted by Aaron Sorkin into the Academy Award-winning movie “The Social Network”, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg while Armie Hammer portrayer the Winklevoss twins.