FUTURE HUMAN
Silicon Valley’s Latest Lifehack: Death
Tech elites are embracing stoic mantras while they chase immortality. Can Silicon Valley have it both ways?
Peter Thiel, the billionaire technology investor and sometime Donald Trump adviser, has a cute line about death. “Basically, I’m against it,” he likes to say when the topic comes up. It comes up quite a bit, actually, because Thiel has spent millions of dollars of his personal fortune, and even more of his partners’ money, funding anti-aging research. In addition to backing numerous biotech startups working to extend human lifespans through his venture capital firm and his personal foundation, and taking human growth hormone to rejuvenate his own cells, Thiel has told me he is “very, very interested” in parabiosis, an anti-aging treatment that involves transfusions of younger people’s plasma. He employs a full-time medical consultant whose job is to research new health discoveries and report back.
Of course, who isn’t against death? Certainly not Thiel’s good friend and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, who told me he’s hoping to cheat the reaper by uploading his consciousness into a supercomputer so that he’ll have an archived version to boot up once his body expires.
