Update on the failsons who somehow made Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Summers look sympathetic

Wonder what the Winklevoss twins did with their Facebook lawsuit money? The answer will probably not surprise you:

The Winklevoss twins have, for the better part of a decade, been trying to convince the world they made a comeback. For anyone who stopped paying attention to them after the Facebook movie came out, here’s the general trajectory: The $65 million settlement from Zuckerberg over their claims to the Facebook idea turned into a major bet on bitcoin, back when the digital currency traded for about $8. (Lately it trades around $38,000.) Gemini, which they started in 2014, was supposed to be their legacy — a highly profitable business that would not only cement their status as serious players in the growing crypto industry. If everything went right, it had the potential to be a $100 billion company of their own. In an often sketchy or even scammy sector plagued by hacks and FBI raids, they branded themselves as rule followers using financial best practices to create a dependable “next generation” exchange that wealthy investors and institutions could rely on as they got involved in crypto investing. They would be the kind of entrepreneurs who would work with government regulators even as much of the rest of the industry tried to avoid oversight. “In the beginning of Gemini’s history, we were very focused on asking permission, and not asking for forgiveness,” a former executive said. “We always acted on the expectation of how regulators would want us to work.”

Gemini is, of course, a reference to twins, as well as a NASA space flight — but any astrologer could tell you that geminis have a tendency for saying one thing and doing another. Last month, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued the Winklevosses’ exchange, claiming that it defrauded 290,000 people out of $1.1 billion worth of crypto. The suit presented a company that was not only willing to overlook its own internal concerns about a partner firm that was holding a huge chunk of its customers’ deposits but to continue representing to those customers that their money was secure even as the board was privately comparing this partner to Lehman Brothers in 2008. Interviews with nine sources, together with court records, reveal a company that began taking larger and larger risks as it attempted to keep up with competitors like FTX and Binance, both of which later ran spectacularly afoul of law. (None of the sources are being named since they continue to work in the industry and fear getting sued for talking about the companies.) That frantic chase is said to have led Gemini to stray from the rule-following conservatism that was the original cornerstone of the brand. Now that they’ve been accused of lying to their customers — and their exchange has fallen out of the top 100 by global trading volume — the twins are facing the most consequential test to their credibility yet.

Well, they were less pretentious about it than Sam Bankman-Fried, give them that.