Story with VR worlds for the wealthy

There is this story I read years ago about a world where the wealthy created VR worlds for themselves to live in. These virtual worlds were extremely realistic and the 'masters' of those worlds could essentially live like gods in those worlds. 'Of course' at one point they figure out how to 'upload' their consciousnesses into these virtual worlds leaving behind their physical bodies. Each has his own world and is the only human being in it and some of them do not decide to live a god-like existence whilst others do.

Now the protagonist isn't wealthy and he has this entire story of his own I forgot about entirely (shame on me), but I have been lately 'quoting' concepts from the book, so I would like to properly attribute them (plus I fear I am attributing some things to this story which weren't from this one, so I would love to check).

Answer

I suspect this isn't the book you're thinking of because it's a series of four books, but the Otherland tetralogy by Tad Williams is along these lines. A consortium of multimillionaires called the Grail Brotherhood have created VR worlds that they plan to live in.

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