Facebook paid up to $65m to settle dispute over origins

LONDON - Facebook paid up to $65m (£44.9m) in a legal settlement with three men who had accused founder Mark Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for the site from them, it has emerged.

The case was settled under wraps last July as both sides asked the court to be cleared of reporters and signed a confidentially agreement.

Now the settlement has been made public after a slip by the law firm acting for Zuckerberg's former Harvard classmates -- twin brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, who had asked Zuckerberg at Harvard to work on their own social networking site, .

Law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges gave out details in its January newsletter under the headline "Won $65 million settlement against Facebook".

However, only $20m of the amount was paid in cash, with the rest consisting of 1,253,326 shares valued by the court at $45m.

The court valued the shares at the same level Microsoft did in November 2007 when it paid $240m for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, making the whole company worth $15bn.

The current value of the shares is not known because Facebook is not publicly quoted, but is likely to be substantially less.

The settlement also threw up an interesting detail, which has previously been reported, which is that Facebook's internal numbers value the company at the much lower figure of $3.7bn.

Under this valuation the Facebook shares allotted to the Winklevoss brothers and Narendra would only have been worth $11m.

The trio are currently engaged in a dispute over fees paid to Quinn Emanuel, which they fired last year.

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