A Strange Thing Happened The First Time Facebook's Co-Founder Met The Winklevoss Twins - They Hugged

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cameron tyler winklevoss

REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss

Dustin Moskovitz is the co-founder of Facebook and the founder of Asana. He's also a burner.

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A "burner" is someone who loves to attend Burning Man, a week-long festival in the Nevada desert that has soared in popularity, especially among the Silicon Valley elite.

Mark Zuckerberg could also be called a burner. So could Larry Page and Elon Musk, who have also attended Burning Man.

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Moskovitz has attended Burning Man five times. This year, he met two people he thought he'd never enjoy meeting: Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The Winklevoss twins infamously sued Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook for "stealing" their idea.

Moskovitz says he's envisioned meeting the twins before and it hasn't been pretty. But the reality was much different, because it happened at Burning Man, where everyone is all love, drugs and camping.

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Moskovitz describes their first meeting on Medium. Instead of fighting, they trio actually hugged.

"These guys are among the only people on earth I might describe as real antagonists in my life or even enemies, but on playa my first instinct was that I quite obviously needed to introduce myself and start with hugs. They had just arrived so I wasn't sure how they'd react, but they were very gracious at the time and I knew they'd understand more deeply by the time they left. Almost immediately when I got back, I had a Facebook friend request from Tyler and we started a thread mutually extolling the virtues of the festival. In no uncertain terms, he described a spiritual experience. I had created all kinds of dark fantasies about how meeting them would go (Tyler assures me it would have been cordial regardless), but on playa it was laughably clear. There, we were all part of the same community. We were always part of the same community."