Winklevoss twins end legal row with Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Winklevoss twins end legal row with Facebook

bbc.co.uk

21 pointscskau11 comments

Their reputation has been tarnished. Yes, they got some money out of it, but it's not like they were exactly poor to begin with. I'm not sure they exit the ordeal victorious.

They live in a world where Mark was just an employee that stole their idea and started another company. If only he stayed on as their employee they would own facebook. They don't understand that you can't have it both ways. You can't have a badass employee that understands your business and gets a lot done, and at the same time expect that employee to happily do most of the work while you supervise and make the profits. If Mark was the kind of person who just wanted to code and get a paycheck he wouldn't have even been doing a side project. He would have got decent grades at harvard and then easily got a 100k+ coding job at a big company working 30 hours a week

No, what happened was they hired a tech person to implement their idea and that person betrayed them. It's not that he just copied their idea for his own project. Personally I'm not a believer in non-compete clauses. What he actually did was to slow down their own works so his would release first. Now that is dirty and immoral. I can't believe all the startup hopefuls on this site would root for someone who behaves like that. Zuckerberg is the anti-role model for what we should all aspire to.

Secretly, they hope they're Just Like Mark(tm).

Openly, the fact that silicon valley attracts these sorts of people is why I stay very far away.

Mark is NOT a role model. Millions of people get duped into sharing information they think will remain private every day. He has screwed over a lot of people in the process.

'Idea people' that hire 'tech people' don't get it. Lots of people have ideas for companies. The twins were not the first people to think of creating a friendster for colleges. They don't get to own 50% of another company because their company was delayed by a few months.

>They don't get to own 50% of another company because their company was delayed by a few months.

I think they should get Mark's shares. It's not that their company was delayed a few months, it's that the founder of another company came in and sabotaged their company long enough to gain critical mass. In fact, I'm surprised what Mark's did isn't illegal.

After a court case this big, this long, one wonders how much of the ~$65 million winds up in the hands of the lawyers anyway.

I think they handled it as well as could be expected. There are a lot of places in this world where if an associate screwed you over as badly as Zuckerberg screwed them over that associate would have been killed. And over a lot less money than this was.

If I were the judge I would have reversed prior judgements (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2555569). I'd never do business with either of those guys.

Either of those guys? Do you mean the twins or do you mean "either of those parties"?

Looks like they extracted their pound of flesh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com