My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
Recall Hyman Roth from The Godfather Part II (memorably played by Lee Strasberg). The elderly Miami mob kingpin cooks up new ventures even as he’s, in Michael Corleone’s phrase, “dying of the same heart attack for twenty years.”1 Roth behaves like a man who thinks time is to be cheated or tricked, not obeyed.
That instinct, of course, is as old as wealth. Pharaohs built pyramids, Renaissance princes hired alchemists, and modern tycoons endow institutes — all to cheat fate in a fashion. The rich have long acted as though death were an event with some degree of optionality.
What’s new is that today’s ultrawealthy no longer treat the impulse symbolically. They are investing real money in the prospect that radical life extension might soon ,be feasible. A Wall Street Journal piece from September, ”The Billionaires Fueling the Quest for Longer Life,” tallies the billions flowing from the ultra-rich into longevity ventures. Silicon Valley figures are bankrolling cellular reprogramming and age-reversal drugs at a scale that would have seemed fantastical a decade ago.2
