Larry Summers on the Winklevoss Twins: 'Rarely Have I Encountered Such Swagger'

What did Larry Summers say about the Winklevoss twins?

What did Larry Summers really think of the Winklevoss twins? In an interview at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference on July 19, 2011, the former Harvard president — also a former Treasury secretary and Obama economic adviser — finally gave his version of the meeting dramatized in The Social Network.

"Rarely have I encountered such swagger, and I tried to respond in kind," Summers said. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss had come to his office in 2004, at the same time Mark Zuckerberg was launching Facebook at Harvard, seeking the school's help in their claim that Zuckerberg had stolen their idea. Summers dismissed them — a scene the film portrays with undisguised glee, and one Summers says was entirely accurate.

Then came the line that made headlines: "One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o'clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they're looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an a**hole. This was the latter case."

How did the twins respond?

The Winklevosses answered with an open letter to Harvard's then-president, Drew Faust, describing their own behavior as "un-swaggering" and Summers' as "tactfully challenged." They claimed he had refused to shake hands with all three visitors (the third being Divya Narendra) because, they wrote, "doing so would have required him to take his feet off his desk."

Where did the legal saga stand in 2011?

By then, the twins' long war with Facebook was winding down badly. After alleging in 2004 that Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for Facebook — and Facebook countersuing over ConnectU's alleged hacking and spamming — the parties reached a 2008 settlement valued at $65 million in cash and Facebook stock. The trio later tried to unwind it, claiming Facebook had misrepresented the stock's value; a judge forced the settlement through, and in April 2011, Ninth Circuit chief judge Alex Kozinski shut down their appeal: "At some point, litigation must come to an end. That point has now been reached."

In June 2011, the twins abandoned their bid to take the fight to the Supreme Court — and a day later filed a new motion in Boston federal court. The litigation never quite ends; only the venues change. But Summers, at least, got the last word on the meeting that started it all.