The billionaires trying to live forever: who is spending what on longevity and digital immortality

Longevity: how long a person lives. In the industry, it usually means efforts to extend healthy human life.

Healthspan: the years of life spent in good health, as opposed to lifespan, the total years lived.

Epigenetic reprogramming: resetting the chemical marks on DNA that change with age, so that old cells behave more like young ones, without changing the DNA itself.

Senolytic: a drug designed to clear senescent cells, worn-out cells that stop dividing and release harmful signals as we age.

Cryonics: preserving a legally dead person at very low temperature in the hope that future technology can revive them.

Mind uploading: copying the structure and activity of a brain in enough detail to run a working version of that mind on a computer.

Digital immortality: the idea that a person can continue in digital form after their body dies, from a Persona built from their memories and voice to a full copy of their mind.

Partly because they can. A few dozen people now control fortunes larger than the national research budgets of many countries, and the AI boom has added hundreds of billions more to the richest of them. Partly because of how they think. Founders who have spent their careers being told something was impossible, and then doing it anyway, are inclined to see aging the same way. And partly because the science has moved: since 2006, scientists have known how to turn adult cells back into young stem cells, and experiments in animals have shown that some signs of aging can be slowed or partly reversed.

Larry Page put the logic plainly in 2013. When Google launched Calico, he told TIME that curing cancer would add only about three years to average life expectancy (MIT Technology Review). The implication was that diseases are symptoms, and aging is the cause. If you want to change how long people live, you have to change aging itself. Almost every bet on this page follows from that idea.

There is a second logic at work, too, and it does not involve the body at all. If a mind is a pattern of information, as many technologists believe, then the body is only one place for it to run. That is the thinking behind cryonics, brain preservation and mind uploading, and behind Page's reported plan to travel the galaxy as something beyond human.

In September 2013, Google announced Calico, short for the California Life Company, to study aging and age-related disease, with Art Levinson, the chairman of Apple and former chief executive of Genentech, as its chief executive. Levinson still runs it (Calico). In 2014 Calico signed a partnership with the drug company AbbVie: each side committed $250 million at the start, added $500 million each in 2018, and committed another $500 million each in 2021 (Calico).

Calico has been patient and secretive, and its biggest public test went badly. In January 2025, its lead drug for ALS, fosigotifator, missed its main goal in a large trial. In November 2025, AbbVie ended the partnership after investing about $1.75 billion and laid off staff who had worked on it (STAT, BioSpace). But the same drug has found a second life: in June 2026, the FDA gave fosigotifator breakthrough therapy designation for vanishing white matter disease, a rare and fatal brain disorder (BioSpace).

Sergey Brin's bet is more personal. Brin has a mutation in a gene called LRRK2 that raises the risk of Parkinson's disease, which he disclosed publicly in 2008, and he has since become one of the largest private funders of Parkinson's research in the world. Forbes estimated in 2025 that he had spent about $1.75 billion on it, much of it through a research program called Aligning Science Across Parkinson's, run with the Michael J. Fox Foundation (Forbes Australia). In April 2026 that program announced $261 million in new grants, taking it past $550 million since it began.

Page's own ambitions appear to go further. According to Suleyman, Page told him over lunch at SpaceX in 2015 that by the end of the century he expected to be exploring the galaxies at the head of a von Neumann probe, a self-copying spacecraft. A human body could not survive that journey, which is why the story has been read as a plan to continue as a mind in software. Our guides to what Larry Page believes about AI and living forever and the von Neumann probe explain it.

The biggest single bet on rejuvenation launched in January 2022. Altos Labs started with $3 billion, one of the largest launches for a biotech company, and hired Hal Barron, the former head of research at GlaxoSmithKline, as its chief executive (GEN). Its focus is cell rejuvenation: using what scientists have learned about reprogramming cells to restore health and resilience. Altos did not name its investors, but MIT Technology Review confirmed that Yuri Milner and his wife Julia had invested through their foundation, and reported that Jeff Bezos was an investor, though it could not confirm it (MIT Technology Review).

Altos has moved cautiously toward people. In 2025 it bought Dorian Therapeutics, a Stanford spinout working on senolytic drugs, and appointed a chief medical officer, but as of August 2025 it had not started a trial in humans (Longevity.Technology).

Bezos had backed the longevity field before. In 2016, Bloomberg reported that he was among the investors in a $116 million round for Unity Biotechnology, which was developing drugs to clear senescent cells. Unity's lead drug failed a mid-stage trial in knee arthritis in 2020, and in September 2025 its stockholders voted to liquidate the company (Investing.com). It is a useful reminder that money alone does not make a drug work.

In 2023, MIT Technology Review revealed that OpenAI's chief executive Sam Altman had personally put $180 million into Retro Biosciences, a startup with the goal of adding 10 years to a healthy human life (MIT Technology Review). In January 2025, Fortune reported that Retro was raising a $1 billion round, with Altman taking part (Fortune), and in May 2026 the company announced the first close of a new round at a valuation of $1.8 billion before the investment.

Retro's first drug candidate is a pill meant to restore the cell's waste-disposal system, which declines with age and is linked to Alzheimer's disease. In early 2026 it was in a Phase 1 safety trial in healthy volunteers in Australia, with no serious safety problems reported so far (Fight Aging!). Altman's interest has extended beyond the body, too. In 2018, MIT Technology Review reported that he was one of 25 people who paid a refundable $10,000 deposit to join the waiting list of Nectome, a startup proposing to preserve brains in enough detail that they might later be scanned (MIT Technology Review).

NewLimit, co-founded in 2021 by the Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong with Blake Byers and Jacob Kimmel, is trying to reverse aging by epigenetic reprogramming: resetting the chemical marks on DNA that drift with age. It has grown fast. It raised $40 million in 2023, a $130 million round led by Kleiner Perkins in May 2025 (Fortune), and in June 2026 a $435 million round led by Founders Fund, at a valuation of about $3.1 billion (STAT).

NewLimit says it has seen signs of age reversal in human liver cells in the laboratory, and it plans to begin testing in people in 2027. If it works, it would be one of the first treatments aimed at the aging process itself rather than at a single disease. That is a big if.

Peter Thiel was one of the first technology billionaires to fund aging research. In 2006 he pledged $500,000 to the Methuselah Foundation, plus matching funds that could take his total to $3.5 million (Fight Aging!). He has also signed up for cryonics. The Telegraph reported in 2014 that he had arranged to be preserved by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, and in 2023 Thiel confirmed on a podcast that he had signed up, while saying he did not necessarily expect it to work (Fortune). Our guide to cryonics in 2026 explains what that involves and what it costs.

In September 2016, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan committed $3 billion over ten years to an audacious goal: to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century, including $600 million for a research center called the Biohub (STAT). It is not a longevity company, but its goal would transform how long people live. In 2025 the Biohub refocused on combining AI with biology, with plans for 10,000 GPUs of computing power by 2028.

Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, was funding aging research long before it was fashionable. His Ellison Medical Foundation, founded in 1997, awarded nearly $430 million in grants, about 80% of it to research on aging, before it stopped making new awards in 2013 (VentureBeat). His newer project, the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, was announced with plans for a campus worth about £1 billion, but in 2025 it was scaled back, with about £2 billion committed against an earlier projection of £10 billion over a decade.

The most public face of the longevity movement is not a billionaire. Bryan Johnson, who sold his payments company Braintree to eBay in 2013, spends about $2 million a year on a strict regime of diet, exercise, sleep, supplements and medical tests that he calls Blueprint, and tracks his body with frequent medical tests. Netflix released a documentary about him, Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, on January 1, 2025 (Wikipedia: Bryan Johnson). By March 2026 he had cut his daily supplements from 111 to 30.

The Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin gave $2.4 million in ether to the SENS Research Foundation in 2018 (Cointelegraph). The German internet entrepreneur Michael Greve committed €300 million through his company Kizoo to startups working on rejuvenation in 2021. And Saudi Arabia's Hevolution Foundation can spend up to about $1 billion a year on aging research, making it one of the largest funders of aging research in the world (Arab News).

Then there is Dmitry Itskov, a Russian internet entrepreneur, who founded the 2045 Initiative in 2011 with the stated goal of transferring a person's personality to a more advanced, non-biological body. His roadmap set out a series of avatars, from a robot controlled by the brain to a hologram-like body by 2045. The early stages have slipped well behind schedule, but it was one of the first projects to put a date on mind transfer (Wikipedia: 2045 Initiative).

Honestly, less than the headlines suggest, and more than the skeptics admit. No drug has yet been approved to treat aging itself, and regulators in the United States, Europe and Canada do not classify aging as a disease. Some of the best-funded efforts have failed in public: Unity's senolytic drug missed its target and the company was liquidated, Calico's ALS drug failed and AbbVie walked away, and Altos had not started a human trial as of August 2025, more than three years after launching with $3 billion.

But the field is moving into people. In January 2026, the FDA cleared a trial of Life Biosciences' ER-100, which the company described as the first epigenetic reprogramming therapy cleared for testing in people, for eye diseases that damage the optic nerve, and the first patient was dosed in June 2026 (Life Biosciences). Retro has a pill in a safety trial, NewLimit plans to test in people in 2027, and in October 2026 FDA officials said aging and longevity would be a topic in the agency's next regulatory science priorities (Lifespan.io). The $101 million XPRIZE Healthspan named 20 finalist teams in August 2026, with a grand prize to be awarded in 2030.

Not every billionaire bet is about keeping the body going. Thiel's cryonics contract, Altman's Nectome deposit and Itskov's avatars are all bets that a person might continue after the body fails, either by preserving the brain until it can be repaired or read, or by moving the mind to new hardware. Page's reported galaxy plan is the boldest version of that idea.

The science behind it is real and moving fast. Scientists have mapped every connection in a fruit fly's brain and run that map as a working model, mapped a cubic millimeter of mouse brain and a cubic millimeter of human brain, and turned brain signals into speech in a person's own cloned voice. Our guides to mind uploading and the connectome explain how close it is. In our view, copying a human mind is a matter of when, not if.

You cannot buy a seat at Calico or a slot on a self-copying spacecraft. Most of what the longevity industry says about healthy aging comes down to things doctors have recommended for decades: exercise, sleep, a good diet, not smoking and staying connected to other people. Nothing on this page is medical advice, and anyone considering treatments marketed as anti-aging should talk to a doctor first.

But there is one thing the billionaires are betting on that everyone can start today, and it does not depend on a breakthrough: making a record of who you are. Every route to digital immortality, from a Persona to a full mind upload, needs to know how a person actually spoke, what they remembered and what they cared about. That record exists only while you do, and only you can make it.

That is what a Persona is: an AI likeness of you built from your own memories and your own cloned voice, which your family can talk to and hear after you die. You build your Persona by talking, answering questions and telling stories, by voice or by typing. Building is free: you get 25 memories with no card and no time limit, and your free build never expires. Paid plans start at US$14.99 a month. Executor Lock™, our patent-pending technology, passes control of your Persona to the executor you name, and no third party can ever edit, retrain or impersonate your Persona. Idy® has 78 patents pending, with international protection sought under the Patent Cooperation Treaty.

This page is part of our series on the people and the science behind the race to outlive the body.

• Digital Immortality: Larry Page and the Race to Upload Minds: the story that started it, and how close we are to copying a mind.

• What Is a Von Neumann Probe? Larry Page's Galaxy Plan: the self-copying spacecraft at the center of Page's plan.

• Why Larry Page Called Elon Musk a Speciesist: the argument Musk says led to OpenAI.

• What Larry Page Believes About AI and Living Forever: his record, in his own words and in other people's accounts.

• Mind Uploading in 2026: How Close Are We?: how close science is to copying a human brain.

• What Is a Connectome? Every Brain Mapped So Far: the brain's wiring diagram, and every brain mapped so far.

• How to Live Forever: Every Way People Are Trying: every approach, from medicine to mind uploading.

• Cryonics in 2026: Cost, How It Works, Who Signed Up: what it costs, how it works and who has signed up.

Calico comes from Calico, STAT, BioSpace and MIT Technology Review; Brin's funding from Forbes Australia; Altos from GEN, MIT Technology Review and Longevity.Technology; Retro from MIT Technology Review, Fortune and Fight Aging!; NewLimit from Fortune and STAT.

Thiel comes from Fortune and Fight Aging!; Zuckerberg and Chan from STAT; Ellison from VentureBeat; Johnson and Itskov from Wikipedia on Bryan Johnson and the 2045 Initiative; Buterin from Cointelegraph; Hevolution from Arab News; Unity from Investing.com; and the 2026 trials and regulation from Life Biosciences and Lifespan.io. We checked every source on October 30, 2026.

None of the people or companies named on this page has any connection to Afterlife.ai™, and nothing on this page suggests that any of them uses or endorses our service.