The rise of Tila Tequila

Nguyen—or, oh, fine, Tequila—may be the least lonely girl on the Internet. She has more than 1.5 million MySpace friends. Her MySpace profile has been viewed more than 50 million times. Her self-published single, the profane and attitudinous F___ Ya Man, now playing on her MySpace page, has logged 13 million spins. (To listen to it is to hear the sound track of a million parents' dreams dying.) She gets somewhere from 3,000 to 5,000 new friend requests every day. She is something entirely new, a celebrity created not by a studio or a network but fan by fan, click by click, from the ground up on MySpace.

Before she hit it big, Nguyen had posed for Playboy.com—its first Asian Cyber Girl of the Month—and modeled for car shows and auto mags and formed girl bands. But her big break came three years ago when MySpace founder Tom Anderson invited Nguyen over to his new site. She had spent plenty of time on websites like Friendster, but her outsize, confrontational personality kept getting her kicked off. She says Friendster booted her five times. "I joined MySpace in September 2003," Nguyen recalls. "At that time no one was on there at all. I felt like a loser while all the cool kids were at some other school. So I mass e-mailed between 30,000 and 50,000 people and told them to come over. Everybody joined overnight."

Pre-Tila, your MySpace friends were mostly people you actually knew. Post-Tila, the biggest game on the site became Who Has the Most Friends, period, whoever they might be. "Once they saw how I worked it, everyone did what I did and started promoting themselves," she says. Not everybody would call this a change for the better; there are those who might even prefer a friendly community to a global popularity contest. Not Nguyen. Over the next couple of years she turned her online persona into a full-fledged business. "This is my job," she says. "That's how you maintain your popularity and keep it alive."

Nguyen clearly grasps the logic of Web 2.0 in a way that would make many ceos weep. She sells Tila posters, calendars, a clothing line of hoodies and shirts. She has been on the cover of British Maxim. She has a single due to be released online. She has a cameo in next summer's Adam Sandler movie. She has four managers, a publicist and a part-time assistant. It's hard to know how to read the rise of Tila Tequila. Does she represent the triumph of a new democratic starmaking medium or its crass exploitation for maximum personal gain? It's not clear that even Tila knows. But she knows why it works. "There's a million hot naked chicks on the Internet," she says. "There's a difference between those girls and me. Those chicks don't talk back to you."