"Billionaires from Silicon Valley are searching for an elixir of immortality; what does this mean for us 'ordinary mortals'?" 

On the first rainy afternoon of September, I meet Giulia Dal Maso at the IAS, a new fellow with a critical, social-scientific perspective on the financial world. She has written about Chinese financial markets and how they have reorganised daily life in a post-socialist context, about the morality of financial markets during the COVID pandemic, and about the pricing of ‘green’ bonds from a ‘dramaturgical model’. She carried out a great deal of study in China on several types of green financial technology, which Dal Maso claims "manipulates nature into an area of financial calculation." Every reason to want to see her frequently. 

But today, we talk about death. And about Silicon Valley: how Big Tech billionaires are pouring large sums of money into scientific research to combat ageing. Dal Maso has been ‘obsessively reading’ about this subject all summer, she tells me. She shows me an initial draft of a paper she’s going to write about it. Alongside the financialisation of care, nature, and our social relationships, Silicon Valley has now also ventured into the financialisation of eternal life, as her research reveals. 

It starts with wealthy entrepreneurs investing in new technologies, eagerly using themselves as guinea pigs. Take 45-year-old Bryan Johnson, who invests two million dollars a year in a team researching how he can live longer. One of the techniques he used on himself until recently was injecting a litre of blood plasma from his 18-year-old son, while simultaneously donating his own blood to be injected into his 70-year-old father. In the BBC podcast The Immortals, Johnson shares how his father responded: “It was one of the most meaningful moments of his life. And the same went for me.” 

It has since been established that such ‘vampire practices’ do not help to counter the ageing process, but Johnson mentions in the podcast that he still lets his health be entirely governed by an algorithm that dictates when he should eat, sleep, exercise, and which vitamin supplements he should take at any given moment. The idea is that he can delay his body’s ageing process long enough until, with the help of AI, the 'ageing problem' can be permanently solved, allowing him to achieve eternal life. This is also known as longevity escape velocity: if life expectancy improves at a faster rate than the body ages, then in theory, you could stay ahead of death. 

Of course, we may chuckle at these eccentric billionaires who ruin their lives with hyper-strict diets, exercise regimes, and vampire sessions, while they could live a quiet life, never troubled by financial worries. Let them be victims of their own delusions. However, you would be unaware of the potential impact these billionaires' obsessions could have on all our lives if that were your belief. 

We once thought it was perfectly fine that Mark Zuckerberg wanted to make a ‘face book’ of his fellow students. What harm could it do that he believed he could reduce people's social lives to likes, hearts, and thumbs up? Let him go ahead. And when Facebook grew bigger and bigger, we almost all carelessly entrusted him with our data. After all, we had nothing to hide, right? If we hadn’t been asleep back then, we might be facing fewer problems today with those poor young people who turn out to be no match for Big Tech's increasingly addictive algorithms. Perhaps we would be less concerned about disinformation during election campaigns. Or about the democratic process itself, now buried deeper and deeper under a thick layer of soundbites on X. 

No, we must keep a close eye on those eccentric billionaires battling ageing. Because they’re not just odd characters who see themselves as life-sized biological experiments - they ultimately decide where the (big) money goes. And in doing so, their view of what it means to be human will shape what the society of the future looks like. 

Dal Maso explains how, in the financial world, ageing has traditionally been viewed as a risk. Think of life insurance or pensions: the earlier someone dies, the less a company or pension fund has to pay out. An early death, financially speaking, is a saving, a kind of dividend, whereas an ageing population represents a risk. In Dal Maso’s home country, Italy, where fewer children are being born and the ageing population is becoming an ever more urgent problem, people speak ominously of the 'silver tsunami.' How will we pay for the care of this ageing population in the future? 

However, in Silicon Valley, the super-rich entrepreneurs turn this whole concept on its head. 'They see ageing as a new form of dividend.' If we no longer aged, or didn’t age so quickly and so unpleasantly, with diseases like dementia and cancer, healthcare costs would decrease, while people's productivity would increase. 

One of the scientists in the BBC podcast believes that within the next five years we will see major advances in life-extending treatments. Perhaps not (yet) an elixir for eternal life, but certainly a fountain of middle age. 

The first trial for anti-ageing drugs has been designed by a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur and approved by the FDA. Until now, it was impossible to test a drug against ageing, but this young entrepreneur found a ‘hack’. She explains that she’s testing the drug on dogs instead of humans. Since dogs live much shorter lives, you can see sooner whether the drug works. These are the first drugs ever aimed not at curing a specific disease, but solely at combating ageing. 

Giulia Dal Maso shows me the names of the tech entrepreneurs investing heavily in such technology: Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Peter Thiel (PayPal), Sam Altman (ChatGPT), Larry Page (Google). She claims that she has read in several documents from major international agencies that the goal of the strategy is to help people live healthier and longer lives. The World Bank, the OECD, the World Economic Forum. “They are reframing the ageing problem as an opportunity; this is why we are now talking about the “longevity economy”. Ultimately, however, it’s clear that the policy agenda is about keeping people as productive as possible for as long as possible. The international institutions and governments with their “longevity roadmap” are focused on creating a new group of workers, technology users, and consumers,” says Dal Maso. 

During her fellowship in Singapore, Dal Maso observed that the push for longer lifespans doesn't always have to come directly from Silicon Valley. “To stay "productive," for instance, the government actively promotes people to use technology at home as much as possible. They talk about the democratisation of longevity and how Singapore should become a Blue Zone 2.0.” A Blue Zone is an area where people live exceptionally long lives. “As long as people interact with technological applications, they produce value. It’s a process based on extraction. The value doesn’t return to the people themselves, but to the large tech companies,” says Dal Maso. 

Sometimes, tech billionaires directly influence the course of history; other times, the influence flows through governments or international organisations. Whether directly or indirectly, the power of this group is too great to dismiss as mere eccentricity. Because if the richest people in the world want to become immortal, what will this mean for our lives as ‘ordinary mortals’? Dal Maso points out that many of these tech billionaires are both conservative and self-professed Christians. Transhumanism, the philosophical movement that includes the quest for immortality, in a sense, isn’t much different from a religion. “Only without the Christian value of ‘memento mori’.” 

Published in De Groene Amsterdammer on September 14, 2024. Translated by the Institute for Advanced Study.