A viral claim is doing the rounds in the financial world that a man (then a boy) bought AI.com in 1993, and has sold the domain for a whopping $70 million now. The domain name turned out to be a gold mine three decades later for the Malaysian entrepreneur Arysan Ismail.
The viral claim states that Ismail brought the AI.com domain as a 10-year-old using his mother’s credit card. The AI.com domain was specifically registered on May 4, 1993. The purchase came a mere five days after the World Wide Web became an official public domain.
Is There Truth to the $70 Million AI.com Viral Story?
There seems to be a lot of holes in the AI.com viral story dating back to 1993. First things first, there was barely an internet connection in Malaysia during that time. Secondly, online transactions for a credit card were not a thing as they never had the CVV security features. The security codes for credit cards were only introduced in 1997.
Domain name ownership in Malaysia was unheard of, even among the niche crowd. To make the story even more obvious, commercial internet access in Malaysia via dial-up was launched in 1995. So how can a 10-year-old in Malaysia use his mother’s credit card to buy AI.com, two years before the commencement of the internet?
The truth of the matter is that buying domain names in 1993 was free, as long as you were able to manage the website. The paper trail for 1993 is long, and someone who brought it for free most probably had lost it simply because the website for the AI.com domain did not go live, and thereafter it cost money to buy it. It was then that a company called Advanced Instruments Corporation bought AI.com in 1996. The hands later changed, and another firm, Future Media Architects, bought the domain for an amount.
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So What’s the Real Story Behind the Viral Claims?
Malaysian entrepreneur Arysan Ismail is not the 10-year-old boy who got $70 million via the AI.com sale. In fact, he purchased the website for millions in 2021 from its previous owner. Ismail then sold it to Crypto.com for $70 million.
FT reported that Crypto.com paid a premium of $70 million to purchase the AI.com domain. “Last year, an opportunity came up for me to acquire this domain, and I thought if you take a long-term view — 10 to 20 years — that [AI] is going to be one of the greatest technological waves of our lifetime. And so it would be a good investment,” Kris Marszalek, co-founder of Crypto.com, said to FT.
Also, Arysan Ismail’s name only became public after Larry Fischer, the director of GetYourDomain, brokered the deal, and eventually put out the seller’s name on LinkedIn.
