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This List of 30 Billionaires - Which One Will End Aging and Death?

Posted: Sat, January 26, 2013 | By: Hank Pellissier

A recent essay by David Kekich of the Maximum Life Foundation intrigued me. It’s titled, “The Most Important Person in the World Will be Whoever Donates $5 Billion to Defeat Aging and Death” What startled me was just how cheap that price tag is! $5 Billion… ? Surely, that little sum can’t be a serious obstacle, can it?

I contacted David Kekich via email and asked him how he arrived at that figure, he replied: “It’s a calculation derived from various inputs from researchers. A breakdown should be somewhere on the MaxLife site.”

Another Transhumanity.net aging expert, Marios Krysiazis, commented that he thought the $5 price was too high, he believed it was probably just $3-$4 billion.

Of course, I was even more dumbfounded. A few billion dollars… that’s just pennies to spend for large governments. Of course that might be complicated, what with war budgets and all - but there’s also dozens of individuals who have enough cash to entirely pay that amount all by themselves.

So.. why don’t they? They don’t want to die, of course not, they have enough cash to enjoy hundreds of additional years.

(On the same day, I saw another news article that claimed the entire problem of poverty could also be alleviated for approximately the same amount.)

I wandered over to Forbes.com and checked out who had enough dough to keep me going forever. Turns out it’s quite a long list; there’s literally hundreds of incredibly rich men and women who could guarantee humanity radically long lives. I decided to trim the list down, to only the Top 30 - below are the Midas moguls who would only have to spend a small fraction of their savings to end aging and death.

i am hoping someone who reads this knows someone on the list and can cajole him or her into giving me - and you - some additional decades or centuries of life. Personally, my only connection to this crowd is I know someone who sees Sergey Brin every year at Burning Man. I’ll have her mention my request to him next September…

Out of all the contenders here for our future “Liberator from Aging” - I think Michael Bloomberg is most promising. He’s got the cash, he likes a high profile, and he’s 70 years old - what’s he waiting for? If anyone bumps into him, mention this, please? I’d appreciate it. Tell him to email me - our lives depend on it!

I have also purchased a lot of books from Jeff Bezos, so he owes me…

Carlos Slim Helu & family $69 Billion 72 years old

Bill Gates $61 B 57 years old

Warren Buffett $44 B   82 years old

Bernard Arnault $41 B   63 years old

Amancio Ortega $37.5 B 76 years old

Larry Ellison $36 B 68 years old

Eike Batista $30 B   56 years old

Stefan Persson $26 B 65 years old

Li Ka-shing $25.5 B 84 years old

Karl Albrecht $25.4 B 92 years old

Christy Walton & family $25.3 B 58 years old

Charles Koch $25 B 77 years old

David Koch $25 B 72 years old

Sheldon Adelson $24.9 B 79 years old

Liliane Bettencourt $24 B 90 years old

Jim Walton $23.7 B 65 years old

Alice Walton $23.3 B 63 years old

S. Robson Walton $23.1 B 69 years old

Mukesh Ambani $22.3 B 55 years old

Michael Bloomberg $22 B 70 years old

Lakshmi Mittal $20.7 B 62 years old

George Soros $20 B 82 years old

Michele Ferrero & family $19 B 86 years old

Sergey Brin $18.7 B 39 years old

Larry Page $18.7 B 39 years old

Jeff Bezos $18.4 B 49 years old

Thomas & Raymond Kwok & family $18.3 B

Alisher Usmanov $18.1 B 59 years old

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud $18 B 57 years old

Lee Shau Kee $18 B 84 years old

Comments:

Hank,

IMHO this approach won’t do it for the main reason that these folks don’t operate in a vacuum.

If you take a closer look, all of these folks at some level have put piles of philanthropic $$$ into some sort of healthcare centric group - Gates Foundation, Carlos Sim Health Institute, David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Sheldon G. Adelson Medical Research Foundation, etc. etc. etc.

Some like Li-Kashing and Mukesh Ambani own healthcare centric biotech companies - Hutchison China MediTech / CK Life Sciences and Reliance Life Sciences

Some like the Google boys invest in life science venture capital and have money in dozen of biotech entities

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud owns hospital systems

And some are just really damn old and wouldn’t understand your pitch

You need to go and look at the thousands of traditional pharma / biotech folks that they have on advisory boards, scientific panels etc. and then you’ll see why this is an exercise much greater than “hey I can make you live forever, give me a few billion”

Even Larry Ellison’s The Ellison Medical Foundation, has no real interest in the topic of longevity.

Sorry for the reality check.

Ira

By Ira S. Pastor on Jan 26, 2013 at 4:01am

IF they are so certain to be able to end ageing and death, why not make a business plan and have them billionaires invest in it! Speak to them in their language: return on investment, net present value, payback periods…etc.

By Samuel Bautista Lazo on Jan 26, 2013 at 4:57am

No amount seems too much to spend on death and destruction - military spending. Trillions are spent on such foolishness. The vast majority of people are deeply opposed to this situation, and yet it continues…

By Rafael Espericueta on Jan 26, 2013 at 6:15am

I had a look at the maxlife.org website (the front page needs updating as it mostly links to 2008 vintage stuff) and I read the outline plan at http://www.maxlife.org/pdfs/mbp.pdf

This suggests a positive cashflow from an AGI-related project within 3 years and positive cashflows from six biotech areas within 4 years. If you can invest and create a software company and six successful biotech companies in 4 years, then yes you can do it with $5billion, but you’d be beating the market performance of the world’s best venture capitalists.

By Tom Nowell on Jan 26, 2013 at 10:19am

I think the most likely people to donate specifically to SENS type research are Sergey Brin (a transhumanist proponent - who was among the first to join the Transhumanist group I started on Orkut back in the day), his partner Larry Page, Elon Musk, Peter Theil (not a billionaire, but certainly interested in this stuff), and possibly Bill Gates, as he starts to feel the ravages of aging, might start pouring some serious cash into the effort. But what I can’t figure out is why they are not doing it now - it’s a no brainer.

By Paul Hughes on Jan 26, 2013 at 4:30pm

Here’s the major disconnect:

In putting down a figure like $5 billion (at the current cost of developing new drugs via the traditional regulatory channels - FDA / EMEA etc of ~$1 billion) you are telling a lot of pretty smart people that hey! 5 “drugs” are all that’s needed to cure aging!!

But right away this doesn’t add up..

What programs like SENS represent, when one takes into account all possible cell replacement therapies, all possible tissue engineering projects, all possible cross-link breakers, all possible junk scavenging antibodies and enzymes, not to mention the more radical “human engineering” components like mitochondrial gene shuffling, WILT, etc. etc. are potentially hundreds of individual drug development / regulatory / manufacturing / reimbursement projects, which when all added up at the end of the day represent literally hundreds of billions of $$ of costs to get to the finish line (not including the cost of all that will fail along the way) - and many, many years

And even if all SENS science was spot on 100% correct, this cost figure is much more than any of these rich folks can put individual bets down on and why they prefer to put money into pet projects like space tourism, asteroid mining etc. etc. instead

And they know this right away - Gates has hundreds of former drug development people working at the Institute; Page and Brin have dozens of life sci venture capitalists both on staff and in funds of funds that they currently invest in.

By Ira S. Pastor on Jan 27, 2013 at 4:46am

Ira,

No, we are no talking about “drugs” at all. If someone can develop a single method in which to grow a new organ or body part (which is already showing serious progress), then it renders hundreds, if not thousands, of drugs useless overnight. And since when did the FDA control the whole world? Regardless of where the breakthroughs occur, if methods can be found to repair one of the damages of aging, people will use it, fly to another country or location, regardless of FDA regulatory approval. Aubrey de Grey is right, as are other people intimately familiar with the problem. $5 billion would be more than enough to develop the tools to repair the 7-10 types of damage that cause disease and aging. Once those methods are developed , and it won’t be old fashioned chemical drugs, but precise molecular repair technologies, aging itself will be cured, along with ALL disease. Should the FDA stand in the way of people’s access to that tech, the underground medical world will BOOM with billions of dollars from people seeking the cure.

By Paul Hughes on Jan 27, 2013 at 12:07pm

Paul,

I’m not referring to “drugs” in the context of “new chemical entities” - but as anything for the prevention / treatment / cure of disease that is developed in a regulatory context - i.e FDA, EMEA, JMHW, etc.

Anything emerging from the SENS portfolio will have to go this way eventually

Sure - costs can be substantially lower if you decide to do stuff in unregulated offshore territories - but that will diminish fund raising possibilities as it takes away quite a bit of credibility

And no, organ engineering will not render thousands of drugs obsolete - the fact is most folks will never require an entirely new organ - a substantial portion of most critical organs can be damaged before transplant requirements - even the experts in the field like Tony Atala, Doris Taylor, etc. openly admit this

Personally I think $5 billion is way to small if you follow the SENS model within a regulated context

Currently for instance I think there are something like 30+ amyloidoses classified - at anti-body development / mfg costs that represents billions of $$ alone just in that segment

By Ira S. Pastor on Jan 27, 2013 at 4:50pm

They don’t do it because it would lead to massive changes in the world if everyone was immortal.

Well, to be clearer, I should say, they’d never “publicly” do it to avoid mass panic and the end of the world as they know it, with massive upheavals of the stock markets, etc.

By Darren Oliver on Jan 27, 2013 at 11:13pm

What if they already did it for themselves?

Would they make it public if they can do it already?

Why would they make it public?

By hmmm.. no on Jan 28, 2013 at 7:41am

Darren, hmmm,

I think you’re missing the subtleties and nuances of what actual cellular repair means. It doesn’t automatically make someone immortal, it just means they can repair the damage. Nothing is to prevent that person from dying from an accident, or from old age or disease later should they opt out of further repair. And people still wouldn’t be immortal. They wouldn’t simply stop aging. The effect would be undetectable at first, and only noticeable after years have passed and people still look young. Then it will become more noticeable.

Also, I seriously doubt they have already solved the problem. Do you know of a single billionaire who hasn’t aged, or who looks a lot younger than they did previously? Clearly, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs are or were not in on the conspiracy. Same for Bush, Cheney, Bloomberg, etc.

By Paul Hughes on Jan 28, 2013 at 1:41pm