Larry Ellison has about 13 years left to live, Alexey Strygin estimates, and proposes spending half of a hypothetical 100 billion dollars on cold storage of organs and whole bodies

Larry Ellison has about 13 years left to live, Alexey Strygin estimates, and proposes spending half of a hypothetical 100 billion dollars on cold storage of organs and whole bodies

On October 28, Strygin published a video on YouTube about the founder of Oracle. He allocates 100 billion dollars across four approaches to countering aging for the 82-year-old Ellison.

The life expectancy calculation draws on Strygin’s study of 389 deceased billionaires. His model predicts that a male billionaire who survives to 82 will live to 93. He then adjusts the estimate for Ellison: genetics adds nothing, exercise adds the maximum of four years, diet adds about a year, and marriage adds about two. That brings the estimate to 100, but the benefits of diet and exercise partly overlap, so the final estimate is 95. Ellison is 82, leaving him 13 years.

From late 1997 onward, Ellison’s foundation awarded nearly 430 million dollars in grants, mainly for aging research. By September 12, 2013, it had announced that it would stop accepting new applications. Strygin sees this as a missed opportunity: with uninterrupted funding, the first therapies targeting aging might already be on the market. The 13 years since then cannot be recovered, and therapies may still fail to arrive within Ellison’s estimated remaining 13 years. His first allocation is therefore a form of insurance: 50 billion dollars for biostasis, or preservation at low temperatures.

At −196 °C in liquid nitrogen, the reactions that cause degradation virtually stop. This works for embryos: in 2022, twins were born from embryos that had been stored this way for 30 years.

“An ambulance carries a dying patient through space to a hospital that can save them. Biostasis is an ambulance through time.”

The next step is organ banking, with an allocation of 11 billion dollars: long-term storage would allow urgent transplants to become scheduled procedures. A 2023 study achieved this in rats: kidneys were stored for up to 100 days at −150 °C, then transplanted into animals whose own kidneys had been removed. The animals survived the 30-day observation period. In October, the authors posted a preprint on pig kidneys a hundred times larger than rat kidneys: one had been stored for 366 days and produced urine on a machine. Then comes a larger task, with an allocation of 38 billion dollars: preserving and reviving an entire person, with their brain and memory intact. The final billion would fund lobbying for legislation allowing terminally ill people to choose voluntary euthanasia through cryopreservation while their brains remain intact.

The remaining 50 billion dollars would fund three approaches, each of which Strygin assesses in terms of decades of additional life. Drugs would receive 13,5 billion dollars, primarily for trials in older people to determine whether combinations of inexpensive, off-patent drugs slow aging. Pharmaceutical companies cannot profit from these drugs, so very few trials take place. The potential gain is no more than a decade.

Bioengineering would receive 12,5 billion dollars to treat aging itself: Strygin estimates that meaningful progress in the biology of aging is possible within 13 years. Five billion of that would go toward a shared database of human health data for laboratories. The potential gain is one to two decades, if the best results in mice translate to humans.

Replacing body parts would receive 24 billion dollars. Thirteen years is a long time for an 82-year-old’s heart, liver, and kidneys to keep functioning, so the money would fund bodies grown without consciousness as sources of organs, along with the gradual replacement of brain tissue with artificial components. If successful, this approach would place no upper limit on the additional lifespan.

Sixty billion of the hundred would be invested in companies. Strygin estimates that, if the approaches succeed, these investments would return two to four times the amount invested because life extension would become one of the largest markets.

“If you are right, you live much longer and become much richer. If you are wrong, you are just as dead as you would have been if you had invested the money safely.”