This is Tom Anderson.
• At 14, the FBI raided his house for hacking Chase Bank.
• At 32, he built MySpace.
• At 35, he sold it for $580 million.
At 39, he vanished from the internet.
Here’s the story behind his $12B empire & how he's living every millennial's dream: 🧵
Tom Anderson was the ultimate outsider in Silicon Valley.
Growing up with alcoholic parents, he taught himself to code at 14.
His escape? Breaking into bank networks.
That's how he got raided by the FBI - hacking Chase Manhattan Bank just to prove he could...
In the early 2000s, social media was exploding, and the biggest player was Friendster.
They had $53M in funding, millions of users & had just rejected Google’s $30M offer.
But Tom saw what everyone missed:
Friendster was too slow, too controlled, and their pages took forever to load.
And in 2003 Tom and his team at eUniverse built MySpace in just 10 days.
• Coded 18 hours a day, sleeping in the office
• Hired 25 moderators to work 24/7
• Built MySpace using ColdFusion, shocking Silicon Valley
His genius move? Letting users fully customize profiles.
Friendster was controlled and polished.
Tom removed all restrictions:
• Total design freedom
• No limits on connections
• Custom backgrounds & music
Experts called it messy, but users loved it.
Social media was about expression, not structure.
After 10 months, MySpace exploded:
• 1M users in 107 days
• 5M users - $0 spent on marketing
• 20M users - pure word of mouth
Then everything changed...
In 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp offered $580M for MySpace.
But few know the truth: Yahoo had offered $750M earlier.
Tom took the deal.
And behind the scenes, he was already preparing for war.
Between meetings, Tom wrote a 50-page manual teaching employees to code new features faster.
He created his billion-dollar framework:
1. Analyzed 2,500 user profiles weekly to track trends
2. Built new features in 24 hours if 100+ users requested them
3. Gave every employee full access to the codebase
That’s how MySpace stayed ahead—for a while…
In 2005, Mark Zuckerberg offered to sell Facebook for $75M over a 2-hour diner meeting.
Tom and News Corp passed after just 30 minutes.
They thought Facebook was too small.
They didn’t see the shift happening.
By 2008, Facebook passed MySpace in traffic.
By 2009, MySpace was bleeding users and couldn’t stop it..
MySpace collapsed in 24 months.
They missed 4 key trends:
• Mobile users grew 300%, but MySpace stayed stuck on desktop.
• Pages took 12 seconds to load - too slow for impatient users.
• User complaints jumped 2,000%, but nothing was fixed.
At the same time, Facebook got everything right:
• Focused on mobile, while MySpace lagged behind.
• Kept a clean design, while MySpace pages were a mess.
• Built better ads, while MySpace flooded users with spam.
By 2009, MySpace was losing 150,000 users every day.
Here's why...
Here are the numbers behind MySpace’s crash:
• Server costs hit $2M/month
• Spent $120M on failed redesigns
• Lost 1,600 employees in 3 months
• Ad revenue dropped 37% in one quarter
In 2007, he wrote a 32-page warning memo to News Corp.
They ignored every single warning.
And then, Tom vanished.
He took his $580M and disappeared.
Instead of chasing another billion, he:
• Built 7 luxury homes
• Traveled to 57 countries in 5 years
• Quietly invested in 12 tech startups
• Spent $40M on photography equipment
Today, Tom lives his best life.
His photos have been featured in National Geographic, and he’s quietly invested $230M in AI companies.
He could’ve stayed in tech. He could’ve tried to rebuild.
Instead, he walked away.
Tom's $12 billion empire crumbled because they ignored mobile users for 783 days.
While Facebook was already at 250M mobile users, MySpace kept building for the desktop.
But their own data showed 78% of new signups were trying to access MySpace on phones.
Tom was smarter than most; he cashed out with $580M to pursue his dream of photographing the world's wonders.
Here's what I like most about the story...
Most people miss million-dollar business opportunities because they wait too long to act.
The ones who succeed move fast, using proven frameworks to scale from five figures to seven figures in record time.
If you want to grow fast and scale smart, you need the right strategy & connections.
A bit about me:
At 27, I was Singapore’s #1 poker player, winning $3M and the Asian championship in Macau.
Since then, I’ve acquired 5 businesses & sold 2 while traveling the world seeking fun & transcendental experiences.
My first acquisition was Kosme Aesthetics which I grew from $2.5K/month to $380K/month in 2.5 years.
If you have a 6-7 figure business that you want to add $1m to with One Flywheel, apply to work with me here: https://www.wayneyap.com/7-figure-sprint
I hope you found this thread helpful.
Follow me @wayneyap for more.
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