Is the story of a man with “eleven properties in the metaverse” (including a “beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds”) whose net worth peaked at $1.2 million real? No, that’s not true: It appeared on the X account of content creator and security researcher Peter Girnus. His account features several other satirical tall tales about being a leader or executive of various companies and organizations, often written in a boastful style commonly found on LinkedIn.
The story originally appeared as a post on X (archived here) where it was published on March 19, 2026:
My net worth peaked at $1.2 million.
None of it was real.
I don’t mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off.
I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it “the next frontier.”
The frontier closed last week.
It’s a mobile app now.
Last year I mass DM’d 340 people the phrase “you don’t understand how early we are.” I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me.
I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg’s neighbor. In a video game. With no legs.
The avatars didn’t have legs.
I thought that was bullish. “The legs are coming,” I told my Discord. “Legs are a roadmap item.” Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis.
I called myself a “digital land baron.”
I put it in my Twitter bio.
I put it in my LinkedIn headline.
It went on for considerably longer than that, but a screenshot of the opening of the post went viral in several places, for example here on Bluesky (archived here):
The Cyber Populist | Hacker at @theZDI | Your favorite vendor’s worst nightmare | Holding the pen | The quiet part, written, then read aloud.
Hi, my name is Peter Girnus and I’m a threat researcher by profession living in sunny Austin, Texas.
When not creating content or analyzing the vulnerabilities as a security researcher, I enjoy spending time with my family, learning new skills, sharpening existing ones, and programming/automating my life.
There is no reason to assume the current story is any different.
