Billionaires in life extension

From agingresearch
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Let's take the top 10 billionaires.

  1. Elon Musk - definitely thought about it.
  2. Bernard Arnault - no evidence. He is 74 years old, his business is Louis Vitton and other fashion.
  3. Jeff Bezos - founded Altos Labs with top scientists (and Nobel Laureates)
  4. Larry Ellisson - owner of Oracle, IT specialist. He gave $330 million to anti-aging research https://time.com/4672962/silicon-valley-longer-life/ and created the Medical Ellison Foundation, which in particular financed research on aging, here are the lists of scientists it funded: https://www.ellison-med-fn.org/emf_fundedscholars.jsp among them Andrzei Bartke (in 2003, and he set the record in 2001), Cynthia Kenyon (2002 and 1998), David Sinclair (2001), Nir Barzilai (2000), Judith Campisi (1998). Though, grants were apparently given only from 1998 to 2004. Larry Ellison is now 79 years old. He is considering giving almost all of his money to charity: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/8/24/21369773/larry-ellison-foundation-oracle-philanthropy
  5. Warren Buffett - well, he’s 93 years old, let’s not judge him harshly
  6. Larry Page is the founder of Calico, but that's about it. Well, also DeepMind. In 2005, had a conversation with Aubrey de Grey[1] (and Peter Thiel).
  7. Bill Gates - just like Elon Musk. He heard about everything, but he is not interested.
  8. Sergey Brin - definitely thought about it, probably has something to do with Calico and, of course, DeepMind.
  9. Zuckerberg - created a Breakthrough prize - they give out $3 million to six scientists every year for discoveries in the field of extending human life. https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2015/10/billionaire-philanthropists-funding-anti-aging-research
  10. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft - unclear

To conclude:

  • 2-3 people made relatively significant contributions: $3 billion Altos Labs (~2% of Jeff Bezos's wealth) and Calico (which has already raised ~$2.5 billion) from Larry Page (and possibly Sergey Brin), somewhere around 1-2% of their wealth. Although they could, of course, have done much more, but they still did something.
  • 2-3 people thought about it and made some little contribution (not that little in absolute value, but very little relative to their networth).
  • 2 people thought about it and decided that they were not interested in it (Elon Musk, Bill Gates).
  • 3 people — we don’t know whether they thought about it or not.