Jilted identical twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss attended a screening of “The Social Network” yesterday with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, to pick apart the facts from the fiction in the retelling of the Facebook creation myth. Unsurprisingly, the two Olympic rowers — who, after claiming ownership of the Facebook idea, successfully sued Mark Zuckerberg for $65 million in 2008 and are trying to leech more — were a bit dazed at seeing their onscreen personae.
“It’s a little surreal,” says Cameron Winklevoss, standing outside the Sony office building in midtown Manhattan with his twin brother, Tyler. “Like hearing your voice on an answering machine.”
In a cab taking them to dinner following the movie, the Winklevoss twins — who were dressed in preppy clothes and each toting “identical gray Tucano man purses” — discussed which scenes they found to be accurate depictions of their experience in the formation of Facebook, and which scenes were, to them, total fabrications. They praise the re-imagining of their sit-down with Harvard President Larry Summers, and admit that though they don’t come out unscathed, the brutal take-downs of Napster founder Sean Parker and, of course, Zuckerberg are far more damning.
But Tyler Winklevoss called the final moment of the film, when Zuckerberg finally shows some guilt and emotion, to be a bit unrealistic. “The real-life Mark Zuckerberg,” Tyler said, “has never shown that inner turmoil in the six years I’ve dealt with him.”
