Silicon Valley’s Obsession With Disrupting Death

Why become a multibillionaire if you can’t live long enough to spend it?

Stephen Moore
5 min readJun 7, 2023
Bryan Johnson (right) and his son

They’ve disrupted transport.

They’ve disrupted the internet.

They’ve disrupted e-commerce.

They’ve disrupted social connection.

They’ve disrupted online communication.

Silicon Valley titans have disrupted just about everything, yet one frontier remains unsolved, one driven by fear, ego and hubris:

Immortality.

A batshit crazy story caught my eye last week. It involves Bryan Johnson, a 45-year-old multi-millionaire attempting to slow down his aging. How exactly? By using blood transfusions from his 17-year-old son. Or, more specifically, the process takes a liter of blood from the youngest and separates the plasma from it before re-infusing it into Johnson. What’s even weirder about the whole thing is that some of Johnson’s blood is then transfused into his 70-year-old father, completing the trifecta of blood swapping. According to an Instagram post by Johnson, it was the “world’s first multi-generational plasma exchange.”

Johnson, who made his fortune as the founder of Braintree, a web and mobile payment company sold to PayPal, is a…

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Stephen Moore

Writer, editor, part-time furniture maker. Subscribe to Trend Mill for critical takes on our dystopian metaverse hellscape future - https://www.trend-mill.com