Silicon Valley turned aging into a bug to fix. Billions followed

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A decade ago, the bleeding edge of self-optimization was strapping a Fitbit to your wrist and obsessing over 10,000 steps. The "Quantified Self" movement, born from Bay Area biohackers who believed rigorous self-tracking could unlock better health, spawned meetups, conferences, and a shared conviction that data was the path to personal improvement.

That movement has largely fizzled as a distinct subculture. But its ethos didn't disappear. It evolved into something far more ambitious and well-funded: the longevity industry, where the goal isn't just measuring your body but reprogramming it to age more slowly.

From tracking to intervention

Both movements share a techno-optimist faith that the body is a system to be debugged. The quantified selfers believed that with enough data (sleep scores, heart rate variability, glucose spikes) you could optimize your way to better health. The longevity crowd has simply moved upstream, targeting the biological mechanisms of aging itself.

No one embodies this evolution more than Bryan Johnson. The tech entrepreneur, who sold Braintree Venmo to PayPal $PYPL for $800 million in 2013, now spends $2 million annually attempting to reverse his biological age and slow the aging process. His regimen includes almost 100 daily supplements, red light therapy, vagus nerve stimulation, and a sleep protocol so rigid he calls himself a "professional sleeper." He claims to age at just 0.64 biological years per calendar year.

Johnson has also famously tried infusing plasma from his teenage son into his own bloodstream, pursuing a theory that young blood might contain rejuvenating properties. That idea has now spawned its own startup category. Circulate Health, a Seattle company backed by Khosla Ventures, emerged from stealth this year offering therapeutic plasma exchange to patients seeking to extend their healthy lifespan.

Johnson now sells the dream to others through his Blueprint supplement line and Don't Die summits, where hundreds pay up to $349 to learn his protocols. It's quantified self taken to its logical, and perhaps absurd, extreme.

But this is what Silicon Valley does. It finds a natural process, reframes it as a problem to be solved, and builds an investment category around the solution. Aging has become a market opportunity, not a fate to be accepted.

Big money, mixed results

The investment numbers reflect a field that's graduated from fringe science to serious category. Silicon Valley billionaires have poured more than $5 billion into longevity startups over the past 25 years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen are among those backing companies pursuing cellular rejuvenation and AI-driven drug discovery for age-related diseases. This year, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's company NewLimit closed a $130 million round focused on reversing cellular aging.

The business models vary widely. At the supplement end sits Elysium Health, co-founded by MIT professor Leonard Guarente, which sells NAD-boosting pills for $40-60 a bottle. NAD is a molecule that helps cells repair DNA and produce energy, and its levels decline as we age. Guarente's theory is that restoring NAD to youthful levels will keep certain aging-related genes functioning properly and slow the process down,  although the science remains contested.

At the clinical end, Fountain Life sells memberships promising personalized health optimization through AI analysis. At the research frontier, companies like Retro Biosciences are developing drugs intended to rejuvenate aging cells, backed by $180 million from Altman.

Not everyone is convinced the science justifies the enthusiasm. Matt Kaeberlein, who trained in Guarente's MIT lab in the 1990s, has become a vocal skeptic of the theories underlying many longevity supplements. He told The Journal he doesn't think anyone has solid clinical data showing these products work for the people buying them.

The track record offers cautionary tales. Unity Biotechnology raised $355 million before being delisted from Nasdaq $NDAQ this year. BioAge Labs went public in 2024, only to halt an obesity drug trial over safety concerns. Its shares now trade well below the IPO price.

Yet money keeps flowing, driven partly by personalities who have made longevity aspirational. Peter Attia's podcast "The Drive" has popularized "healthspan," the idea that what matters isn't just years lived but years spent healthy. Johnson's willingness to experiment on himself earned him a Netflix $NFLX documentary.

The movement has now reached the halls of power. Jim O'Neill, who ran an anti-aging research nonprofit and sits in Thiel's orbit, was recently confirmed as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Longevity advocates see him as one of their own.

Of course, we already know that quality healthcare, exercise, good food, and low stress are the keys to a long, healthy life. All of those are easier to come by with money. The gap in life expectancy between rich and poor Americans is now more than a decade. The longevity industry is selling NAD boosters and plasma transfusions to people who already have the fundamentals covered. For everyone else, the basics remain out of reach.

What the quantified self movement got right was the intuition that individuals could take control of their health through measurement and intervention. What it couldn't deliver was transformation. The longevity industry is betting that with enough capital and biological insight, transformation is exactly what's possible. 

Whether that bet pays off — and for whom — remains to be seen.