November 27, 2006
Second Life’s first millionaire
The virtual world of Second Life has created a character that is Donald Trump and Martha Stewart rolled into one.
Linden Lab, its San Francisco-based creator, confirmed today that its virtual world had made a real-life millionaire out of Anshe Chung.
Anshe – real name Ailin Graef – a property developer in Second Life, had put out a press release claiming to be the first virtual-world millionaire. The valuation was based on the avatar’s virtual assets at current exchange rates (272 Linden dollars = 1 US dollar).
Anshe Chung has grown her fortune from a $9.95 account opened two and a half years ago. She began by buying small pieces of real estate, which she subdivided, developed and landscaped to sell on or rent.
She now has real estate equivalent to 36 square kilometres of land, cash in the form of several million exchangeable Linden dollars and a number of virtual shopping malls and store chains.
Philip Rosedale, Second Life’s founder, said in an FT interview that Anshe had indeed amassed enough assets to become a millionaire.
“We can confirm the information that she presented in the press release as being true. A lot of how she’s done that is she’s provided really rich community controls and so people choose to live in her community, she owns 100s of sims of islands.”
Anshe seems immune to the current housing slump in the US - with Second Life expected to hit 2m members by the end of the year, there are no shortages of people looking for new properties.
Chris Nuttall, San Francisco
If you save and invest money every month, you will become a millionaire at some point. As Einstein put it, compound interest is the “eighth wonder of the world.” It all depends on how much money you currently have, how much interest that money will earn (the tricky part), and how much you can save each month and, of course, how long you can wait. Another critical part of the equation is that you leave the interest earned alone so that it keeps earning interest.There’s one often-cited example of the power of compound interest.
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