Boston Entrepreneur Claims Half Of Winklevoss' $65 Million Facebook Settlement
BOSTON (CBS) - Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss - the twin Harvard University crew athletes who claimed a piece of Facebook's ballooning valuation - have dropped their Supreme Court appeal, and will accept their settlement with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg, according to a court document they filed Wednesday.
However, the twins face another legal battle - with a Boston entrepreneur who claims they owe him a piece of their $65 million settlement. Meet Wayne Chang, a serial entrepreneur based in Boston who also attended Harvard in 2004, when Zuckerberg launched Facebook while an undergraduate there. With talk of a pending Facebook IPO at a $100 billion valuation, The Winklevoss' stock could be worth as much as $270 million, after a five-way stock split gave them 6 million shares in the company.
Lisa Van Der Pool of the Boston Business Journal reports
In a separate legal claim, Chang, who declined to be interviewed for this story, asserts his right to half of that amount. Chang states he and the Winklevoss twins had a business partnership. He says he worked on the ConnectU site, developed by the Winklevosses and Divya Narendra, which is at the core of their dispute with Zuckerberg.
That partnership, said Chang attorney Alan Rose Jr., entitles the Boston entrepreneur to half of the Facebook shares and cash doled out in the Winklevoss' settlement, which transferred ownership of ConnectU to Facebook Inc.
"They received the settlement proceeds and he received nothing," said Rose, a partner at Rose, Chinitz & Rose, a 16-year-old firm based in Boston.
According to Chang's complaint, he had developed a third social media site, called i2hub. The Winklevoss twins approached him about integrating i2hub with ConnectU, and the terms of their agreement gave him half ownership. The two parties then formed a partnership, and went on to develop other Internet properties.
Chang's suit is filed in the business litigation session at Suffolk Superior Court. It is currently in discovery, Rose said, with a summary judgment date set for next spring.
