Throwing 600 million yuan, the United States buys land! Chen Tianqiao, the "godfather of online games", surfaced after nine years

At the end of the rich is the landlord.

Chen Tianqiao, the long-dormant "godfather of online games", once again "appeared" in the public eye.

According to China Fund News, Chen Tianqiao owns a 198,000-acre (80,127 hectares) piece of woodland in Oregon, USA.

It is reported that this forest land was purchased by Chen Tianqiao from Fidelity National Financial Ventures in 2015 for 85 million US dollars (about 610 million yuan). According to information about the beneficial owners disclosed by the state of Oregon just last month, the name of the forest land is Shanda Asset Management.

According to the rankings, owning the forest has made Chen Tianqiao the 82nd largest landowner in the United States, and also made him the second largest non-American landowner after the Irving family in Canada.

So, why does a rich man from the game industry become a big landlord? What has Chen Tianqiao experienced over the years?

In fact, the super-rich are buying land, and Chen Tianqiao is not alone. In recent years, some super-rich people have chosen to buy land in order to find a solution to hedge against inflation.

And the well-known Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg and other bigwigs in the technology and investment circles are also big landowners.

According to relevant media statistics, the number one landowner in the United States is John Malone, a telecommunications tycoon in the United States, who holds 2.2 million acres of land, while Bezos, the founder of Amazon, holds 430,000 acres of land; Ellison bought 98% of the land of Lanai, the sixth largest island in Hawaii, and almost turned this 364-square-kilometer island into his private island; and Gates has nearly 270,000 acres of land through his investment company, and even Buffett has hundreds of acres of land.

Even Jack Ma, the former richest man, bought a 28,000-acre eco-park in New York State in 2015 for $23 million.

This shows how much the super-rich are keen on land.

"Godfather of Online Games" Chen Tianqiao

Speaking of Chen Tianqiao, the "Godfather of Online Games", many of the new generation may not know much about it.

The history of Chen Tianqiao is mainly concentrated in the decade from 1998 to 2008.

In 1993, Chen Tianqiao, who graduated from Fudan University, joined Lujiazui Group. The aura of education and the fact that I am relatively good, so his starting point is higher than ordinary people, and after joining the company, he worked in the president's office of the group, and Chen Tianqiao worked for five years.

Five years of training have given Chen Tianqiao a high vision.

In 1998, Chen Tianqiao joined Jinxin Securities.

But in less than a year, he chose to quit his job and start a business. He was joined by his wife, younger brother and classmates, and their first project was not a later online game, but a cartoon website.

In that thriving Internet era, Chen Tianqiao quickly received venture capital from China.com, when Chen Tianqiao was only 27 years old.

After two years of hard work, Chen Tianqiao began to clarify his direction and entered the field of entertainment interaction. So his company started as an agent for "Legend" and gradually became a giant in the field of Chinese online games.

After entering the field of online games, Shanda has reached nearly 60 million registered users in less than a year, and its market share has reached 65%.

By 2003, Shanda's net profit exceeded 100 million. In the same year, Shanda received a $40 million investment from SoftBank and hired Tang Jun to handle the listing.

In 2004, under the operation of Tang Jun, Shanda was successfully listed on the NASDAQ, and the company also became the second largest Internet company in China, and Chen Tianqiao's worth once exceeded 12 billion yuan.

Since then, Shanda has gone more and more smoothly on the road of diversification, and in 2009, Shanda Games went public, raising more than $1 billion.

But unfortunately, in his 30s, he suffered from panic attacks.

Later, Chen Tianqiao also responded to the media, saying that every time the sun sets, he feels that his life has come to an end.

Under the torture of illness, Chen Tianqiao pressed the pause button for Shanda, and in order to recuperate, he began to gradually let go of the company's business, sold what should be sold, and then delisted the game from the NASDAQ, and part of Shanda's business was sold to Tencent. In 2014, he stepped down from all of his positions at Shanda. It was then used to set up Shanda Asset Management Company in Singapore to invest, involving listed company stocks, equity investment, venture capital and real estate.

Since then, Chen Tianqiao's "news" has become less and less.

Why are the super-rich keen to buy land?

Previously, tech tycoon Bill Gates was on the hot search because he bought land.

Gates also said in an interview with Sina Finance that he felt very helpless about these rumors, "This is a very sad thing for social networks."

In fact, Gates' large-scale purchase of farmland came in 2009, the year Bill Gates bought a 492-acre farm in Wyoming for more than $10 million. Since then, Gates has been on the road to buying land.

Gates later responded, saying, "I've invested in these farms to make them more productive and create more jobs." In fact, all of these decisions are made by a professional investment team.

According to the data, Cascade Investment Company is the one who manages the land for Gates, and the main trader is investment consultant Michael Larson, and the Gates family's investment in farmland and land is basically led by him.

John Malone, the number one landowner in the United States, owns much larger land than Bill Gates, and his company was acquired by AT&T in 1999, so he received tens of billions of dollars in funding.

After that, he started to buy and buy, from pastures, forest farms to fields, to real estate, he was very passionate about land, and eventually bought up to 2.2 million acres of land.

And tech tycoon Zuckerberg also bought about 5.6656 square kilometers of land in Hawaii through a series of transactions in 2014.

Recently, the media exposed the "doomsday bunker" built by Zuckerberg in Hawaii.

According to the planning documents, the property, called Kulau Ranch, will include an underground shelter of about 464 square meters with its own energy and food supply, which, combined with the land purchase price, will cost more than US$270 million, which is equivalent to about 1.9 billion yuan. If built, this would be one of the most expensive private properties in the world.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average value of arable land in the U.S. rose 8.1% last year and has risen by more than a third since 2020.

On the whole, this is a sure-fire deal, and it is precisely based on the role of hedging against inflation, so in the wealth distribution of these super-rich, the purchase of land has become an important asset allocation method.