Winklevoss twins end legal row with Facebook

The Winklevoss brothers, Harvard contemporaries of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, ended their legal battle with the social network yesterday.


They reached a $65m settlement in 2008, after claiming that Zuckerberg stole their idea.


A US appeals court ruled in April that they could not back out of the deal.


The pair had threatened to go to US Supreme Court to overturn the decision but have now said they will not pursue it.

Back in 2008, the Winklevii were awarded a $65 million settlement for commissioning Zuckerberg to design their own social networking site ConnectU in 2003, and an April 11 ruling by a federal judge upheld the decision, telling them their “litigation must come to an end.” However, with Facebook’s IPO evaluation recently estimated at $100 billion, it didn’t come as a surprise that the twins were looking to launch yet another appeal, this time in front of the Supreme Court.

Maybe the twins finally realized $65 million is still an obscene amount of money to get for doing absolutely nothing.

Posted in: appeal,claiming,design,facebook,federal,ipo,pair,pursue,stolen,sumreme,twin,winklevoss