For former school teacher Ailen Graef, everything began with a meager amount of US$ 9.95 two and half years ago. She subscribed for an account in Linden Lab's Second Life and chose to become Anshe Chung, her avatar. Today, Graef could be the first online personality ever to achieve a net worth of US$ 1 million.

In the virtual world, Chung started by purchasing small scale virtual real estate. She then subdivided and developed those with landscaping and themed architectural builds for rental and resale. Since then, her operations had included the development and sale of properties for large scale real world corporations. Her total number of assets now stand at 36 square kilometers of land, supported by 550 servers as well as Linden dollar holdings, virtual malls, stores and brands.

More interestingly, Chung started her own business in the real worlds that is more like a spin-off of what she does in Second Life: Anshe Chung Studios develop 3D environments for purposes of education, business conferencing and product prototyping. Also, she currently owns shares for various SL companies.

All of the said virtual properties can actually be exchanged for legit U.S. money. Developer Linden Lab has several in-game programs like property value statistics and current simulator prices to ascertain the exact worth of Chung's assets.