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):
(Image source: Bluesky post by BladeoftheSun)
The bio of Peter Girnus' account on x.com @gothburz (archived here) reads:
The Cyber Populist | Hacker at @theZDI | Your favorite vendor's worst nightmare | Holding the pen | The quiet part, written, then read aloud.
On his own site (archived here) he describes himself as:
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.
Girnus frequently posts tall tales about corporate or business failures dressed up as great wins in a style heavily reminiscent of a certain genre of LinkedIn posts. Here is one about rolling out Microsoft Copilot to 4000 employees (archived here), here is one where he pretended to be the "Director of National Sentiment Alignment at Tim Hortons" (archived here), here he is the "VP of Developer Ecosystem at OpenAI" (archived here).
In the past Girnus has freely admitted when a post was satire (archived here):
The post was satire, but I appreciate you demonstrating exactly the mindset I was satirizing. https://t.co/J7GSyBfhJH
-- Peter Girnus 🦅 (@gothburz) December 9, 2025
There is no reason to assume the current story is any different.
