The problem is democracy. Not billionaires.
Do you mean the process and funding of democracy? Sorry, your pithy statement is ambiguous 
.
You can “effectively prevent the development of a billionaire class” somewhere (that’s the case in most countries in the world), and then your democracy will be hijacked by billionaires elsewhere. So, the core problem is democracy itself: a failed system.
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Isn’t the issue then the fragility of democracy, not democracy itself. Rather than setting up the billionaires versus democracy debate as though they were mutually exclusive; the issue can then be framed as : can everyone participate in the appointment and removal of those who govern us, even in a world with unequal wealth? Or are you fundamentally opposed to the democratic impulse?
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I’m not opposed to the democratic impulse in my household (even though in that case it turns out that my wife’s vote counts double 
). In other cases, it seems to be a pretty bad system. I’m not sure there will be many democracies left in 100 years.
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No, not a chance. Billionaires are not going to try any revolutionary new longevity treatments until its been proven safe; and proven safe means lots of regular people in clinical trials testing something out to see if there are any longer term negative side effects. Why, if you have billions, would you risk it? You can wait for a few years until it’s proven in people with less to lose - then adopt it easily and repeatedly (if need be).
Bryan Johnson is likely as far as it gets right now, and even he is being beaten (from a longevity enhancing perspective) by people like Julie Gibson Clark spending a small fraction of the amount he spends. The science is still quite a ways off, but it is progressing.
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I wish it were true that elites had access to secret amazing treatments because that would mean there’s hope for the rest of us to get it. Unfortunately I agree with RapAdmin that it is unlikely.
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it will be interesting to see whether democracies survive superintelligent AI and exponential longevity breakthroughs. I do wonder whether lifespan extension will improve democracy (older wiser voters?) or worsen it (grumpier, less tolerant older voters?)
But to counter your sentiment, I’d argue democracies are less brittle than autocracies - which have increased likelihood of economically destructive schisms and revolutions.
Also, Putin, Xi etc are good examples of how autocrats become increasingly isolated and cut off from true information. So their decision making may be faster, but more flawed. Autocracies also lose human capital because they’re less attractive countries to live in. But that may be less destructive in an age of AI
Ominously, it looks like we’ll be running the autocracy vs democracy experiment again over the next five years - so we probably don’t have long to wait…
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A lot depends upon what people’s objective is from a political system. A rule of law needs to be a key priority and hence avoiding the concentration of power in an autocracy means that even if democracy ends up making stupid decisions from time to time at least it does not get completely dreadful.
I think the difficulty in terms of what the alternatives are is that Churchill’s view on this is right.
“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, and that public opinion expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.”
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Yes, I totally agree. Democracy gets my vote!
My only doubt is whether democracy will be outcompeted by an alternative system in an age of hyper-longevity and superintelligent AI. Survival of the fittest sadly doesn’t always mean survival of the best.
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WSJ Sept 8, 2025
The Billionaires Fueling the Quest for Longer Life:
Investors including Peter Thiel and Sam Altman are making big bets on where longevity science is headed.
The Billionaires Fueling the Quest for Longer Life - WSJ.pdf (5.2 MB)
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- Rule of law and democracy are two different things. You have a strong rule of law in Dubai free zones (for commercial matters) or Singapore, despite the absence of democracy there. Meanwhile India and Brazil are great democracies with weak rule of law.
- Churchill said that in 1947. Back then, the House of Lords was still unelected (hereditary peers, bishops, law lords). The Crown (unelected) retained powers (constitutional but in practice mostly ceremonial): appointing the PM and giving royal assent to laws. Needless to say, the UK ruled over vast colonies without democracy for the locals. Every adult man and woman over 21 could vote, but there was plural voting: university graduates and business owners had two votes! On top of that, the full franchise was fairly recent, so the system was still carrying a pre-democratic legacy (the 1928 Equal Franchise Act for all women and the 1918 Representation of the People Act for all land or home owners above 21 / 30). So Churchill had no experience of the full-fledged democracy we have today. What he called “democracy” was in practice a mix of aristocracy (Crown + Lords), plutocracy (plural voting + historical voting rights tied to land ownership + media controlled by the wealthy elite) + democracy (Commons) + white rule (in remaining UK colonies).
I disagree with some of the above on a factual basis. However, this is not really relevant to the issues for Rapamycin.News and hence I am happy to leave it that we don’t agree and not try to work out why.
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I agree that it’s off topic 
In any case, the elites don’t have access to age reversal for sure!
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In fact not only do the elites not appear to have access to age reversal, but the money that is being spent by them on research seems to be mainly in areas that won’t be that effective.
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Yamanaka factors retard tissue and organ aging in experimental animals; this is now known. Who would know if the Yamanaka factor were applied to elites on secret islands?
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the cancer risk is the big obstacle. If you have a few $billion you probably want things tested on someone else first.
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My speculation would be that billionaires would rather not be in the guinea pig frontline. But would rather see novel interventions tested on others first.
And also that they’d be rushing to market to make both more $Billions and gain kudos of backing a winning strategy.
My guess is that the first person to reach 150 years of age won’t be a billionaire, but rather someone who signed up for a research study
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Agreed, but there is a special class of wealthy, powerful billionaires who do have “guinea pigs”: Absolute Monarchs and Dictators. Do I need to name them? There are probably about a dozen such leaders:
• Dignified absolute monarchs (Saudi, Brunei).
• Ruthless authoritarian dictators (North Korea, Syria, Belarus).
• Primitive/barbaric warlords (Congo militias, Kony, Taliban types).
• The Chinese special case – not one man, but a vast, centralized state where wealth and power are so immense that things can slip through the cracks (think Wuhan flu). Experiments can scale to a level no other system can match.
So yes, our own dearly-beloved billionaires are playing in the longevity game. But compared to the dragons and monsters out there — monarchs with absolute power, dictators with no restraint, warlords with no conscience, and a state-giant like China — they almost look tame.
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Having dedicated human experimentation farms can give you data on safety but efficacy still takes decades to evaluate.