Some of the richest people on the planet have decided that dying is optional, and they’re throwing serious money at the problem.
They fast for hours, take experimental drugs, freeze themselves, measure everything about their bodies, and spend what most people earn in a lifetime on treatments that barely anyone outside their circle can access. The implication is that wealth buys a longer life, and that while the rest of us age normally, the super-rich are quietly pulling ahead.
The truth is far less glamorous than that. The things that actually help wealthy people live longer are almost exactly the same things that help everyone else. And the research that could genuinely change how long humans live, for everyone and not just billionaires, is sitting largely unfunded while the ultrarich spend their cash on stuff that mostly doesn’t work.
What some of the world’s richest people are actually doing might surprise you.
Sam Altman, who runs the company behind ChatGPT, takes a diabetes drug called metformin every day in the hope it slows down ageing, even though nobody has properly tested whether it does that in healthy people. He also fasts for 15 hours a day and stares into a bright LED light each morning. Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal, has looked into using young people’s blood to try to stay younger, something that sounds like a film plot but is apparently a real area of research. Bryan Johnson spends around £1.5 million a year on an extreme diet, dozens of supplements, and various medical procedures, and posts about all of it constantly online.
Away from tech, LeBron James reportedly spends over a million pounds a year on his body, including sitting in a pressurised oxygen tank and being exposed to temperatures of -160 °C. One Russian billionaire is funding a project to upload human brains into computers. A 97-year-old billionaire in China takes a particular supplement every day and has put £18 million into the company that makes it. The approaches are all wildly different, but they share one thing: there’s very little proof that any of them actually help you live longer.
The things that genuinely help rich people live longer are available to everyone.
Wealthy people in the US do live around 10 to 15 years longer than the poorest people on average. However, that gap isn’t because of blood transfusions and oxygen tanks. It’s because they don’t smoke, eat better food, move more, stress less, and can actually afford to see a doctor when something goes wrong. Those are the real reasons, and none of them cost a million pounds a year.
With the technology that exists today, there genuinely isn’t much extra that money can buy you in terms of living dramatically longer. Scientists have found interesting things that seem to slow ageing in mice and worms, but not a single treatment has ever been properly tested in humans to find out if it works the same way. The gap between something working in a mouse and working in a person is enormous, and nobody has crossed it yet.
Some of these treatments could actually be making things worse.
It’s not just that most of this stuff probably doesn’t work. Some of it carries real risk. Health regulators in the US have warned that getting blood transfusions from young donors can cause infections and serious allergic reactions. Eating very little for long periods, which some longevity enthusiasts swear by, has been shown to weaken bones and damage the immune system over time. Taking dozens of different supplements all at once is regularly linked to liver damage and other nasty side effects.
There’s also a mixing problem that doesn’t get talked about enough. When you combine lots of different compounds at the same time, they can interact in ways that make things worse rather than better. A well-known example from medicine is that a common drug for erectile dysfunction combined with certain heart medications can cause blood pressure to drop so dangerously low that it becomes life-threatening. Human bodies are complicated, and throwing lots of things at them at once is more likely to cause a problem than fix one.
Most billionaires don’t actually act like they believe immortality is coming.
If the super-rich genuinely thought a cure for ageing was just around the corner, you’d expect most of them to be scrambling for it. But they’re not. The handful of famous cases generate a lot of press, but when you consider there are several thousand billionaires in the world, the number doing anything unusual to try to live longer is actually quite small. Most of them seem to be just getting on with their lives like everyone else.
Elon Musk has said openly that he thinks people living longer would actually be bad for society because older people rarely change their minds and that stops new ideas from getting through. He says he has no investments in longevity research at all. That’s a pretty striking position from someone who tends to be enthusiastic about technology solving most problems. It suggests that even among the very wealthy, the idea that ageing is about to be beaten isn’t something most people actually believe.
The money going into longevity research is tiny compared to what’s actually needed.
The biggest-name investment in this area is a secretive company called Altos Labs, which reportedly received around £2 billion from investors including Jeff Bezos. It hired a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and is doing genuinely interesting work on whether human cells can be reset to a younger state. But £2 billion is roughly one percent of Bezos’s total wealth, about the same share he puts into his rocket company each year. If he genuinely thought this was his best shot at living decades longer, you’d expect him to put rather more behind it.
The wider picture is stark. In the US, research into ageing gets around twenty times less funding than cancer research, even though most cancers are actually caused by ageing in the first place. The clinical trials needed to find out whether promising drugs actually extend healthy human life simply haven’t happened because no one has paid for them. The science is there. The money isn’t.
A relatively small amount of funding could change things for everyone.
There are several drugs that show real promise for slowing ageing. Metformin is one of them, and there are others including a drug called rapamycin and a group of treatments that clear out old, worn-out cells from the body. None of these have been properly tested in humans yet, not because it’s technically impossible, but simply because nobody has stumped up the money to run the trials.
For around £740 million, less than one percent of what the world’s billionaires are collectively worth, you could fund ten to twenty of these trials and have a pretty reasonable shot at finding at least one treatment that genuinely helps people live longer and healthier lives. And crucially, drugs like metformin cost pennies per pill. They’re not exclusive treatments for the wealthy. They’re cheap, generic medicines that could be given to billions of people if someone would just pay to find out whether they actually work. The billionaires spending millions on experimental personal treatments would do far more good, for themselves and for everyone else, by funding the science instead.
