MattTheOne
Account Closed (Disallowed)
- Impact
- 10
Let me cut through the noise on this one, because the story that went globally viral in February 2026 — the one about a 10-year-old Malaysian boy buying AI.com for $100 in 1993 with his mom's credit card — is demonstrably false. Not slightly exaggerated. False. And as a domain community, we deserve the real version.
This is the full, verifiable ownership timeline of AI.com, from registration to record sale.
THE REGISTRATION (1993)
AI.com was registered on May 4, 1993, just five days after the World Wide Web became a public domain. This timing detail alone should trigger skepticism about any "10-year-old bought it" story — the web had literally just opened its doors.
Domain registrations in 1993 were free. The $100 annual fee didn't exist until September 1995. Online credit card transactions weren't possible in May 1993 — the first occurred in late 1993 or August 1994 at the earliest. Commercial internet access in Malaysia only became available in 1995.
Maintaining a domain in that era required dedicated DNS servers, a permanent internet connection, and extensive technical knowledge — not just expensive for most adults outside large corporations, but effectively inaccessible to a 10-year-old.
The actual first registrant, confirmed through Wayback Machine archives: AI.com from 1993 through the early 2000s was registered to Advanced Instruments Corporation, a US company. A business, not a child.
THE FMA ERA (EARLY 2000S — 2021)
In the early 2000s, the domain was acquired by Future Media Architects (FMA), a Kuwaiti-owned domain holding company founded by Thunayan Al-Ghanim in 2002. FMA held it as part of a massive 120,000+ domain portfolio. By 2019, FMA was under new management following internal litigation.
FMA was one of the most important premium domain portfolios in the world. Holding AI.com through this era — while AI remained largely an academic backwater — was a long-term bet that paid off enormously for whoever came next. The domain was listed for sale through SAW.com, FMA's brokerage of choice.
THE REAL PURCHASE (SEPTEMBER 2021)
This is where the paper trail is iron-clad. On September 29, 2021, Elliot Silver at DomainInvesting.com noticed via his DomainTools alert that AI.com had transferred from Uniregistry to Google's domain registrar. He contacted SAW.com's Jeff Gabriel and Amanda Waltz, who confirmed the sale. The asking price was $11 million. Gabriel described the buyer as "someone in the NFT space."
Independent researchers George Kirikos and Bill Patterson later confirmed what the domain industry already knew: Arsyan Ismail acquired AI.com in September 2021 from FMA for approximately $11 million, likely in cryptocurrency — consistent with his known profile as a crypto and NFT investor.
So the true origin of Arsyan Ismail's ownership is September 2021, not 1993. He paid approximately $11 million, not $100.
THE REDIRECT GAME (2023–2025)
This is where things get genuinely interesting from a domain strategy perspective. Arsyan didn't build anything on AI.com. Instead, he ran a brilliant — and somewhat trollish — campaign of strategic redirects that generated millions in free media coverage and kept the domain at the top of the news cycle.
The redirect pattern: ChatGPT (February 2023), X.ai/Grok (August and November 2023), an MKBHD video (February 2024), Google Gemini (February 2024), DeepSeek (January 2025). At no point did OpenAI, Google, Elon Musk, or any other company own the domain.
The NamePros community was actually ahead of the curve here — members noted clearly that there was no record of AI.com ever having been owned by OpenAI, X, or any other company. The redirects were a deliberate "hotspot binding" strategy: associating the domain with whoever was dominating AI headlines at any given moment, without a dollar of advertising spend. Every redirect generated another wave of speculation and another notch of perceived value. Masterclass in domain hype-building, honestly.
This is the full, verifiable ownership timeline of AI.com, from registration to record sale.
THE REGISTRATION (1993)
AI.com was registered on May 4, 1993, just five days after the World Wide Web became a public domain. This timing detail alone should trigger skepticism about any "10-year-old bought it" story — the web had literally just opened its doors.
Domain registrations in 1993 were free. The $100 annual fee didn't exist until September 1995. Online credit card transactions weren't possible in May 1993 — the first occurred in late 1993 or August 1994 at the earliest. Commercial internet access in Malaysia only became available in 1995.
Maintaining a domain in that era required dedicated DNS servers, a permanent internet connection, and extensive technical knowledge — not just expensive for most adults outside large corporations, but effectively inaccessible to a 10-year-old.
The actual first registrant, confirmed through Wayback Machine archives: AI.com from 1993 through the early 2000s was registered to Advanced Instruments Corporation, a US company. A business, not a child.
THE FMA ERA (EARLY 2000S — 2021)
In the early 2000s, the domain was acquired by Future Media Architects (FMA), a Kuwaiti-owned domain holding company founded by Thunayan Al-Ghanim in 2002. FMA held it as part of a massive 120,000+ domain portfolio. By 2019, FMA was under new management following internal litigation.
FMA was one of the most important premium domain portfolios in the world. Holding AI.com through this era — while AI remained largely an academic backwater — was a long-term bet that paid off enormously for whoever came next. The domain was listed for sale through SAW.com, FMA's brokerage of choice.
THE REAL PURCHASE (SEPTEMBER 2021)
This is where the paper trail is iron-clad. On September 29, 2021, Elliot Silver at DomainInvesting.com noticed via his DomainTools alert that AI.com had transferred from Uniregistry to Google's domain registrar. He contacted SAW.com's Jeff Gabriel and Amanda Waltz, who confirmed the sale. The asking price was $11 million. Gabriel described the buyer as "someone in the NFT space."
Independent researchers George Kirikos and Bill Patterson later confirmed what the domain industry already knew: Arsyan Ismail acquired AI.com in September 2021 from FMA for approximately $11 million, likely in cryptocurrency — consistent with his known profile as a crypto and NFT investor.
So the true origin of Arsyan Ismail's ownership is September 2021, not 1993. He paid approximately $11 million, not $100.
THE REDIRECT GAME (2023–2025)
This is where things get genuinely interesting from a domain strategy perspective. Arsyan didn't build anything on AI.com. Instead, he ran a brilliant — and somewhat trollish — campaign of strategic redirects that generated millions in free media coverage and kept the domain at the top of the news cycle.
The redirect pattern: ChatGPT (February 2023), X.ai/Grok (August and November 2023), an MKBHD video (February 2024), Google Gemini (February 2024), DeepSeek (January 2025). At no point did OpenAI, Google, Elon Musk, or any other company own the domain.
The NamePros community was actually ahead of the curve here — members noted clearly that there was no record of AI.com ever having been owned by OpenAI, X, or any other company. The redirects were a deliberate "hotspot binding" strategy: associating the domain with whoever was dominating AI headlines at any given moment, without a dollar of advertising spend. Every redirect generated another wave of speculation and another notch of perceived value. Masterclass in domain hype-building, honestly.
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