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Anthony Devlin/PA Archive

Winklevoss twins give up 'Social Network' legal case

Cameron and Tyler, the ‘Winklevii’, will not appeal an earlier court ruling which told them to make do with their original settlement.

THE HARVARD TWINS at the centre of a long-standing dispute over their role in the founding of Facebook have opted not to appeal a court ruling which blocked them from renegotiating a settlement.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss claimed that Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for the social networking site from a similar project, which they had hired Zuckerberg to work on.

The power struggle – as documented in the Oscar-winning film The Social Network – had ultimately led to a settlement which saw the twins and their co-partner, Divya Narendra, accepting a $65m settlement including $45m in stock.

The twins’ stock deal was based on an individual share value of $36 each – while Facebook staff were offered the same shares for $9 each.

When the Winklevoss twins – dubbed the ‘Winklevii’ – learned of this, they went to court looking to undo the settlement, saying they should have been told about the internal valuation when the negotiations were going ahead.

But in April, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals told the pair that their litigation had to “come to an end”. Today, after rumours of an appeal, the twins confirmed they would not appeal to the Supreme Court.

Narendra had chosen not to take part in that failed bid to renegotiate the deal.

Had the twins taken $40m worth of shares at $9 each instead of $36, they would have taken four times as much of an ownership in the site.

Since the site now has an estimated total worth of $70bn, any extra stake the twins could have wrangled would have made them a fortune.

The twins continued with their own project in spite of Facebook’s success; their site Harvard Connection later became ConnectU, which closed last year.

The pair also represented the US at rowing in the Beijing Olympics, and last year represented Oxford in the Boat Race against Cambridge.

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3 Comments
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    Mute Eamon Harbison
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    Aug 11th 2011, 10:37 PM

    Seems to me that Amazon has no one to blame but itself if its data center lost power…. They should have had ample UPS to bridge the utility power loss and the time their N+1 generators kick in. Also, they should have diesel tanks onsite to store at least 72hours worth to run the center on full load, and a local supplier on contract to re-fill the tanks after 24 hours. If Amazon do not have any these redundancy measures in place, I would be very surprised… If they do and they still had power loss that affected their customers services, then they need to look internally for where to point the finger of blame!

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    Mute Christopher Duffin
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    Aug 12th 2011, 9:47 AM

    Not to mention their own software hampering restoration of the downed instances and a complete lack of help from their support in trying to restore things. This has been a joke from the beginning.

    I also cannot understand why they only had power from one sub station supplying the DC. Any data centre I’ve been involved with has had power coming from at least 2 sub stations to avoid these issues.

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    Mute John Jacob
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    Aug 11th 2011, 11:15 PM

    who gives a crap really ?!?!

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    Mute Darren O'Brien
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    Aug 12th 2011, 2:42 AM

    I give a crap. Our company had a good chunk of our infrastructure down
    for 2 days because of this. Im an Irish system administrator working in Spain and this was embarrassing to say the least. We chose Amazon for its reliability and really cutting edge cloud services. The fact that its in Ireland was a bonus and made me proud that one of the best cloud facilities in Europe, if not the world, is in my home country. But we’re going to think hard about continuing with Amazon as I’m sure many others will. It’s a pity but when your company’s existence depends on servers staying on, and even minutes of downtime cost thousands in revenue and incalculable loss of reputation, you’ve got to go where you’ll be sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

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    Mute Damian Keane
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    Aug 12th 2011, 12:30 AM

    People who think that Ireland could make some sorely needed money by being a reliable cloud computing bridgehead for Europe.

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    Mute fitszpatrick
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    Aug 12th 2011, 3:47 AM

    Loss of power is a serious issue. Hundreds of thousands of children on the brink of death by starvation with no back up systems. This is going to have a detrimental effect on their profitability.

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    Mute Jane Bresnan
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    Aug 12th 2011, 8:04 AM

    Maybe there was a lack of surge protection? 48 hours is a long time for a data center to be down. There must have been equipment damage. All data centers will have bought at least two independant feeds from the esb as well, were the esb supplying both from the same substation?

    It is very embarrassing for this to happen. Ireland has been trying to market itself as an ideal data center location because of the lack of extreme weather conditions, distance from earthquake zones and political stability. Top class electrical infrastructure is part of that marketing speil.

    We do not want to lose the investment and employment brought by these corporates.

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