James Shields is Building a Billion $ Company

Honored to be mentioned. Humbled by the people who reached out. I love you guys. This is just the start. @xenospizza is a rising star.

@TheZachEffect TY Zach

@Jamesashields I want to publicly say @Jamesashields is the coolest person in NYC

In NYC Sunday Night through Thursday late. Lmk if there’s anyone I should meet in media, podcasting, startups.

@Dirtdog I know a Pakistani soup guy

ATTENTION Does anyone know someone on the dark inner web that would like be paid in cash and happen to just go out and cut down any trees in front of retail buildings that they are asked to and take a vow of silence? Asking for a friend not me...obvi

@justindross Solid

I have personally built myself more housing since 2023 than Gavin Newsom built with $750M

@Sun_of_ApoIIo Good for the soul

My grandpa owns an onion farm and occasionally decides to take naps in the middle of the field.

@nypost @Tara4America Because he would rather blow up our finances for free crap

Two more top bond-rating firms issue dire warning for NYC over Mamdani budget trib.al/adzEbFW

@endingwithali Ahead of schedule

move to nyc for 6 months, pay for hinge+ and get on raya, get a girlfriend in NYC, then gaslight her into moving back to SF with you

@acquisizioni Nothing says access like meeting someone who can introduce you to his boss. Who also needs to talk to his boss. Who’s waiting on his boss to get anything done.

How do I know SoHo House is ngmi? My intern (who I pay $20/hr) just told me he plans to join.

@ShlomoChopp This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Wow.

Short New York City. This goes to vote in June. nysenate.gov/legislation/bi…

@gothburz Oh wow

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. I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts. My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment. My actual apartment has furniture. Location, location, location. My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court. I held. Diamond hands. That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait. A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users. He said I didn't understand the technology. I didn't. I still bought more. We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts. We voted to "acquire strategic parcels." The vote passed unanimously. I voted four times. My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY." The slide had a rocket emoji. That was my entire financial model. In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000. It's worth $14,000 now. I don't talk about the Ape. I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera. My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was. I said "digital art on the blockchain." She asked why it cost more than her car. I said "you don't understand Web3." She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment." She's not in my Discord. Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million. It's worth about $90,000 now. I felt better about mine after I heard that. That's community. WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero. We're all gonna make it. None of us made it. But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something. It doesn't. But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus. Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse. I need to say that again. $84 billion. More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines. They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets. It lives on as a mobile app. My beachfront villa is now a mobile app. Location, location, location. Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that." Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025. That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun. They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables." The pivot took four years and $84 billion. I pivoted too. I'm an AI real estate investor now. I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models." I don't know what that means. I gave him $40,000. He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan. The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank. Q4 is always blank. That's where the exit scam goes. My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes. I said $1.2 million. He said "current market value." I said $6,400. He stared at me for eleven seconds. I know because I counted. He asked if I had any other investments. I showed him my NFTs. He stared for longer. I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance." He asked if I'd considered a 401k. I told him a 401k was "legacy finance." He told me to leave his office. The metaverse is dead. I don't accept that. I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car. Location, location, location. The location is nowhere. But I'm early. I'm always early. That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

@BeckyQuick Bury the lead!

There are pictures of my feet hidden in the documentary tonight. Watch closely.

@kailajlim Get it girl!

May God give me the energy to host my own birthday party after 2 hosted tech events (150+ people), a late night dinner out week, supporting portco events, and leaving the office after 8pm everyday

@tatithechin Niceeee. Any good finds?

today we drove 80 miles and stimulated the economy

@kahnfessions Pretty much

Your network is your net worth

Fucking fuck. Just kill me now. Lower.

@kenashley Same. I was riding around collecting rent from the lemonade stands.

I ruled my neighborhood on one of these.

Noooo don’t outsource the tennis ball boy or ball girl! Still really cool. Only thing I did in high school was graduate. That was my accomplishment.

@VickieforNYC Lmao you bet your sweet ass this is on a full tax payer funded scholarship.

This is insane. Just completely insane.

@Jeffdthompson Elder statesman

@Jamesashields Well I’m feeling like an old man 😂😂

If I had to choose I’d rather be rich in life than rich in💰