Tyler Winklevoss

Early Life and Education

Tyler Winklevoss and his twin brother, Cameron Winklevoss, were born on August 21, 1981. Winklevoss graduated from Harvard University in 2004 with a degree in economics and later completed a Master of Business Administration degree at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. ⁵ He rowed competitively at Harvard and represented the United States alongside his brother in the men’s coxless pair at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, finishing sixth. ⁶

ConnectU Litigation

While undergraduates at Harvard University, the Winklevoss brothers and classmate Divya Narendra developed a social networking website called Harvard Connection, later renamed ConnectU, and recruited fellow student Mark Zuckerberg to write code for the project. The brothers later alleged that Zuckerberg had used the concept to build Facebook. The parties signed a mediated settlement in February 2008 under which the ConnectU founders received cash and Facebook stock valued at $65 million. The brothers afterward sought to void the agreement, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected that effort in an opinion issued on April 11, 2011. ⁷

Business Career

Tyler Winklevoss and his brother directed part of the settlement proceeds into bitcoin beginning in 2012 and formed Winklevoss Capital Management, a family investment firm that backed early-stage technology companies and that invested $100 million in Gemini in May 2026. ⁸ The brothers founded Gemini in 2014 as a digital asset exchange and custodian. As of July 2026, Tyler Winklevoss was the chief executive officer of the company and his brother Cameron was the president. ¹

On September 11, 2025, the business, then operating as Gemini Space Station, Inc., priced an initial public offering of 15,178,572 shares of Class A common stock at $28.00 per share, raising roughly $425 million. ⁹ The shares began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on September 12, 2025, under the ticker symbol GEMI at a valuation of approximately $3.3 billion. ¹⁰

Political Contributions

In June 2024, Tyler Winklevoss and his brother each donated approximately $1 million in bitcoin to Donald Trump‘s presidential campaign, a combined 30.94 bitcoin. Winklevoss wrote that the Biden administration had “openly declared war against crypto” and described Donald Trump as “the pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto, and pro-business choice.” Because the amounts exceeded the federal individual contribution limit of $844,600, $155,400 was refunded to each brother. ^{11 2}

On August 20, 2025, Winklevoss announced on X that he and his brother had transferred 188.4547 bitcoin, valued at approximately $21 million, to the Digital Freedom Fund, a political action committee registered with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on July 11, 2025. ^{2 12} He wrote that the committee existed “to help realize President Trump’s vision of making America the crypto capital of the world” and that the brothers wanted “three more years” of the administration’s agenda. ¹³ The committee was organized to support Republican candidates in the 2026 midterm elections and to press for cryptocurrency legislation, including a narrow market-structure bill that would limit dual regulation of digital assets by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a statutory ban on a United States central bank digital currency, and liability protections for software developers. ²

An FEC filing disclosed on July 21, 2026, recorded a contribution of bitcoin valued at $5,011,860.44 from Winklevoss to Make America Great Again Inc., a super PAC supporting President Trump, on June 19, 2026. His brother contributed $5,006,604.47 on the same date, and the super PAC liquidated the assets through Gemini’s trading platform. ^{3 14} The contributions were made 23 days after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission joined Gemini in asking a federal judge to set aside portions of a 2025 enforcement settlement that had required the company to pay $5 million. The filings contain no indication that the agency coordinated with the brothers. ^{15 16}

In August 2025, Winklevoss and his brother participated in a private placement in American Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency mining company co-founded by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump that subsequently merged with Gryphon Digital Mining and listed on the Nasdaq. ¹⁷ Winklevoss also publicly opposed the nomination of Brian Quintenz to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, arguing that Quintenz had a conflict of interest arising from his board seat at the prediction market Kalshi. ²

Regulatory Matters

Gemini Earn, a lending program that Gemini operated with Genesis Global Capital, drew roughly $900 million from about 340,000 customers before Genesis halted withdrawals in November 2022 and filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2023. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Gemini and Genesis in January 2023, alleging that the program constituted an unregistered offering of securities. ¹⁸ New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) sued Gemini, Genesis, and Digital Currency Group in October 2023 and expanded the claim to roughly $3 billion in February 2024, asserting that Gemini had withheld internal analyses showing that Genesis loans were under-secured and heavily concentrated with Sam Bankman-Fried‘s Alameda Research. ¹⁹

Gemini settled with the New York attorney general’s office in 2024, returning about $50 million in digital assets to more than 230,000 Earn customers, at least 29,000 of whom were New York residents. ²⁰ A federal judge dismissed the Securities and Exchange Commission case with prejudice on January 23, 2026, after the parties filed a stipulation. ¹⁸