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Investors including Peter Thiel and Sam Altman are making big bets on where longevity science is headed

How much would you invest in the possibility of living to 150 or beyond? Or having 20 extra healthy years?

For the ultrawealthy, it’s more than $5 billion over the past 2½ decades, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of longevity investment deals in PitchBook, public company statements and regulatory filings.

Silicon Valley giants Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Yuri Milner and Marc Andreessen are among the boldface names behind the influx of money in the longevity industry. Thiel’s quest for longer life spans nearly a dozen companies—some of which were funded by his venture firm and others by a nonprofit foundation he backed—that raised more than $700 million, according to the Journal’s analysis.

They and other wealthy investors have helped push what was once something of an academic backwater into the cultural mainstream.

Many companies ultimately fail, but the ultrawealthy and other enthusiasts are following the money and the science to decide where to invest and what to take.

Who’s betting big

Here’s a look at the network of entrepreneurs and big investors building up the longevity space, the sector’s growth and what scientific approaches the ultrawealthy are placing bets on.

How much money

Money has been pouring in from some of the wealthiest investors, fueled by these personal connections and passions.

Armstrong’s fundraising for NewLimit includes a $130 million round in May. Among the company’s investors are the funds of fellow billionaires Khosla and Thiel.

Altos, launched in 2022, raised $3 billion—the most of any company identified by the Journal—to develop technology to rejuvenate cells. Artificial-intelligence drug discovery company Insilico Medicine, which is backed by Diamandis’s BOLD Capital, raised more than $500 million to treat multiple age-related diseases. Another company, BioAge Labs, which is developing drugs to treat diseases of aging, raised $559 million, which includes investments from Khosla Ventures and Andreessen’s a16z fund.

BioAge’s chief executive, Kristen Fortney, met investors interested in her research at a Stanford lab and through her involvement in a salon for longevity enthusiasts run by Betts-LaCroix.

BioAge went public in 2024, raising the funds to develop an obesity drug and other programs. A trial of an obesity drug halted later that year over safety concerns. BioAge launched a new trial of a different obesity drug this year.

“A lot of people already make it past the age of 100 and they’re healthy. So why can’t that be achievable for all of us?” Fortney said.

That concept has taken hold and is helping drive investors, with the average fundraising round for longevity companies growing by more than 20% in the past decade to nearly $43 million this year, by the Journal’s calculations.

Why they invest

Many of the ultrawealthy individuals flooding the longevity space are motivated by highly personal reasons.

Naveen Jain says his father’s death from pancreatic cancer led him to found Viome Life Sciences, which has raised over $230 million. Viome sells at-home health tests and analyzes the data to make personalized nutrition and supplement recommendations. Jain, a billionaire, invested $30 million of his own money in Viome. Benioff and Khosla Ventures are also investors. “I want to make aging optional,” Jain says.

Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, tried a diet designed to mimic the effects of fasting developed by longevity scientist Valter Longo. Bancel later led a $47 million funding round for Longo’s company L-Nutra, which develops fasting nutrition programs.

“I want to be able to have the biggest impact,” says Bancel.

Khosla through his firm is one of the most prolific longevity investors identified by the Journal, with each of the investments focused on different aspects of aging. “At 70, someone should feel like a 40-year-old,” he said during an interview with the Superteam Podcast, a group of cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

The science attracting big money

There is no consensus on what makes something a longevity company. The Journal identified three key areas the ultrawealthy are focused on, by companies’ publicly reported missions: Efforts to reverse or change aging, develop treatments for age-related diseases, or sell products or services claiming to improve health and extend lifespan.

The quest for ways to “reprogram” and rejuvenate cells is one of the biggest generating buzz in Silicon Valley circles. The idea of returning people to a more youthful state is propelling Altos, Retro, Juvenescence and more than 80 other companies to raise some $5 billion. Retro says it is trying to raise another $1 billion.

Companies seeking treatments for diseases linked to aging include BioAge Labs. Nearly 60 biotechs in this space have raised nearly $5 billion.

For those interested in antiaging strategies that can be tried right now, big money is pouring into companies selling health trackers, supplements and cosmetics, raising some $2.6 billion.

Longevity personalities

Prominent personalities have helped build longevity’s cachet among wealthy investors and the public, founding companies and building demand.

Peter Attia: Author of a bestselling longevity book and host of a popular podcast, Attia co-founded the high-end clinic Biograph with Silicon Valley entrepreneur John Hering.

David Sinclair: A popular lecturer on the longevity circuit, the Harvard professor’s genetics lab is a frequent stop for wealthy individuals interested in learning about and sometimes funding age-reversal research.

Bryan Johnson: His Silicon Valley-fueled fortune and willingness to spend $1 million a year on self-experiments attempting to slow down his aging led to a Netflix documentary and public attention.

Peter Diamandis: The entrepreneur and investor tapped billionaires and other wealthy individuals as donors for the XPrize Foundation he founded and its XPrize Healthspan, a prize competition with a $101 million purse to develop ways to reverse aspects of aging.

Unless cost of hydrogen made from renewable energy falls, some manufacturers would have to use fossil fuels, warn executives

Executives of Germany’s leading manufacturing and energy industries have warned that “green” hydrogen is still far too expensive compared with other fuels, raising doubts over a key plank of the country’s efforts to cut carbon emissions.

Miguel Ángel López Borrego, chief executive of German steel major Thyssenkrupp, warned that unless the cost of hydrogen made from renewable energy fell, the company would have to resort to fossil fuels to run a steel plant which was intended to be its flagship green facility in the industrial town of Duisberg.

Germany, an industrial powerhouse and the EU’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, had laid out a series of bold targets for producing and importing the fuel, underpinned by tens of billions in subsidies and loans. But faced with sluggish economic growth and trade competition from China, Europe’s biggest economy is joining a broader global slowdown in its adoption.

Coal-fired blast furnaces generate around 7 per cent of Germany’s total emissions and the EU’s most populous nation had been at the forefront of a drive by the bloc for green hydrogen as it seeks to meet its goal of cutting emissions by almost 90 per cent by 2040.

However, green hydrogen costs around €6 per kilogramme — close to double the cost of “grey” hydrogen produced from natural gas. Energy industry executives say they expect that green hydrogen will rise to around €10 per kilo in 2030 due to rising regulatory costs and investment costs, about four times the price of natural gas today.

López told the Financial Times he would “prefer to start reducing CO₂ in, I don’t know, 2028 with [methane] gas instead of waiting for the green hydrogen”, he told the Financial Times. 

While the use of methane gas produces fewer carbon dioxide emissions than coal-fired power, the fossil fuel’s methane molecule has an 80 times greater warming potential over a span of two decades than carbon dioxide.

The warning from Germany’s leading steelmaker comes after ArcelorMittal, Europe’s biggest steel producer, in June abandoned plans to convert two German plants to green production, and would turn down €1.3bn in public subsidies aimed at supporting the change.

Heavy vehicle maker Daimler in July also announced it was pushing back plans to produce trucks powered by hydrogen by several years due to slow progress in building refuelling stations.

“I can have the best product on earth but if there’s no demand, it doesn’t matter,” said Jan Taschenberger, chief operating officer of new green power and gas at the nationalised gas group Uniper. Referring to the “hype cycle” for technology adoption, he said there was a danger that the sector had entered the “trough of disillusionment”.

Sopna Sury, chief operating officer for hydrogen at the energy company RWE, said a litany of European regulation on what qualifies a fuel as green hydrogen was making the fuel overly expensive.

There are strict rules for the end-product to qualify as green hydrogen in the EU. Brussels stipulates the power used must come from a wind or solar farm that was established in the last three years located in the same country as the electrolyser producing the hydrogen. There are also time limits on how quickly the electricity must be used after it is generated.

“If you take away all those constraints . . . then you could reduce the cost of green hydrogen by at least €2 per kilogramme,” Sury said.

The industry gloom has been compounded by mixed signals from Germany’s new government. It has promised to accelerate the hydrogen rollout but also slashed subsidies aimed at encouraging companies to adopt green hydrogen.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his economy minister Katherina Reiche, who have made the revival of economic growth a top priority, have made lukewarm public commitments to its previous climate change policy.

The last government, a three-way coalition that included the Green party, put green hydrogen at the centre of its plans to decarbonise its large and hard-to-electrify heavy industry.

Work started this year on building a near-€20bn hydrogen “core network” consisting of mainly converted gas pipelines stretching 9,000km, and expected to be complete by 2032.

Berlin also struck international partnerships aimed at paving the way for large-scale imports as well as setting a target of having the 10GW of electrolyser capacity to produce hydrogen at home in Germany by 2030. 

Yet currently, the country is far away from that target — with installed capacity of just 0.1GW, according to a recent report by the IEA.

Optimists point to the fact that a further 1.3GW is under construction — roughly around half of all the current projects in Europe. 

Industry and energy players have generally welcomed the new German government’s promise to instead support the use of grey or blue hydrogen made from fossil fuels.

“There are still dark clouds on the surface but if you look slightly below there are good things happening,” said Nils Aldag, CEO of the German company Sunfire, which produces electrolysers for hydrogen.

But there is frustration at the cut in state funding for industrial adoption of green hydrogen in the draft budget presented to the cabinet in June.

“We saw some signals that maybe hydrogen is not on the top priority of this government,” said Barbara Fischer, head of FNB Gas, an association representing companies responsible for gas transmission networks which are building the hydrogen grid.

An energy ministry spokesperson said the funds allocated for industrial decarbonisation subsidies this year had been reduced because Berlin only wanted to commit an amount that could realistically be approved this year. 

The German government took “the concerns of the business community seriously”, adding that it wanted to ensure the development of a hydrogen economy was “accelerated and designed more pragmatically”.

Mathias Koch, a project manager for hydrogen at the Berlin-based climate change think-tank Agora Industry, said public procurement was “an obvious place to start” to boost demand for green hydrogen.

Merz’s government plans to pour €500bn into infrastructure over the next 10 years.

Koch said projects should use green steel or green cement “so that the producers of green steel and their suppliers have certainty that this [demand] will come.”

But Michael Liebreich, who runs a clean energy advisory firm and has long been a deep sceptic of green hydrogen, said demand constraints were not the cause of the problem for the slow uptake. “The fundamental reason is that it’s expensive . . . and not only is it expensive now but it will remain expensive,” he added.

EU steelmakers plead for tariffs on cheap imports to avert collapse

Senior Thyssenkrupp executive warns industry is ‘not going to survive’ without emergency protection

European steelmakers are urging Brussels to impose US-style tariffs on all imports of the metal, warning the industry risks collapse under pressure from cheap Chinese products and Donald Trump’s high duties.

“We need protection [or] we are not going to survive as a steel industry,” Ilse Henne, a senior executive at Germany’s Thyssenkrupp, told the Financial Times.

The EU’s steel industry was struggling to compete with cheap imports from China and high energy prices even before the US president slapped 50 per cent tariffs on their exports to America earlier this year. Trump’s duties on other countries, particularly China, have raised fears that the EU will be flooded with more cheap metal diverted from the US market.

Henne, chair of the supervisory board for Thyssenkrupp’s steel division, declined to suggest what tariff level would be appropriate on steel brought into the bloc, but warned that imports were still increasing even as domestic demand remained sluggish.

France and 10 other EU member states have previously suggested a 50 per cent duty should apply beyond a certain quota in an effort to halve imports.

Other key European industries such as carmaking rely on high-quality European-made steel, Henne argued.

“Do we want to produce cars in Europe? Yes or no? Do we want to produce them with European steel? Yes or no? And if that is what we want for many reasons . . . then we need to take some decisions,” she added.

Europe’s steel sector is among the critical heavy industries that European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has focused on as she attempts to reverse the bloc’s wider economic decline.

EU steelmakers were forced to make 18,000 job cuts in 2024, according to trade body Eurofer, adding to the 90,000 laid off since 2008.

The commission has promised to set out a new safeguard measure for the industry this month but has yet to provide details. It introduced 25 per cent duties on steel imports in 2019, during Trump’s first term. But the regime has since been progressively relaxed.

In 2024, the EU imported 28mn tonnes of steel, a quarter of total sales, and double the amount in 2012/13, when China became a big exporter, Eurofer said. The sector expects to lose most of the 3.8mn tonnes it exports to the US annually as a result of Trump’s tariffs.

France and the other 10 member states, which include Italy and Spain, also want a US-style “melted and poured” rule that would prevent Chinese steel being routed through a third country to avoid duties.

The commission had hoped to lower US tariffs on steel and aluminium as part of the EU’s framework trade deal with Washington, agreed at the end of July, but they remain in place. Both sides pledged to continue negotiations on how to deal with global overproduction.

However, steelmakers do not believe there will be quick progress.

“It is highly doubtful that any [tariff rate quota] or significant exemptions will be granted by the US in the near future, if at all,” Eurofer said in a letter this month to Von der Leyen, seen by the FT.

“Effectively, the EU steel industry is the worst off of all EU industries,” said the letter.

Eurofer wants a system of duty-free import quotas for products the bloc needs, but believes that above certain levels a prohibitive tariff should be applied. 

“A highly effective, capacity-related EU steel trade measure will both secure a viable European steel industry succeeding to decarbonise and demonstrate to the US that the EU is playing its part in ringfencing against global overcapacity,” it added.

Olof Gill, the commision’s deputy chief spokesperson, said: “The commission intends to adopt by the end of this quarter a regulation limiting the amount of steel which can be imported into the EU.”

He added that it was in discussions with the US on “a tariff rate quota solution for EU exports of steel and aluminium, and their derivative products”.

Thyssenkrupp and its steel division — once a pillar of Germany’s industrial strength — are in the process of a painful restructuring. The company has announced plans to slash capacity at its steelworks and reduce the headcount by 11,000. 

Japan’s prime minister plans to quit, says state broadcaster NHK

Shigeru Ishiba expected to confirm resignation at press conference on Sunday

Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba has decided to resign to make way for a new leader and prevent the ruling Liberal Democratic Party from splitting, according to state broadcaster NHK.

His decision came ahead of a party leadership election on Monday, when a majority of LDP parliamentarians were expected to force Ishiba out of office.

The prime minister’s formal resignation statement is expected at a press conference at 6pm on Sunday, said Japanese media.

Ishiba’s position as prime minister has hung by a thread since July, when his party lost outright control of the upper house of Japan’s parliament.

That setback followed a disastrous lower house election last October — a gamble by Ishiba which backfired and left the LDP without a majority in the lower house.

Ishiba, who edged into power through a leadership election in October 2024, joins a long list of Japanese prime ministers who have lasted only about a year in office.

Despite rising approval ratings in national polls, Ishiba has struggled to secure support. Over the weekend, a series of key allies either privately or publicly said that the LDP needed to find a new leader.

As Ishiba’s political future has grown more uncertain, speculation has focused on which figures in the LDP were most likely to succeed him.

Several MPs told the Financial Times that the leadership would probably be contested by Sanae Takaichi, the conservative who narrowly lost the party leadership race to Ishiba last year, and Shinjiro Koizumi, who Ishiba appointed farm minister to tackle the country’s rice shortage issues.

The LDP has ruled Japan almost continuously since 1955 but has increasingly shown signs of extreme strain as its moderate and conservative factions battle over how to steer the country through a period of steep inflation, demographic decline and a worsening geopolitical environment. 

Those strains have been worsened by the recent rise of small, populist opposition parties which have drawn younger voters away from the LDP.

Union says management has refused to engage on pay and working conditions

London faces days of severe transport disruption from Sunday unless the RMT union cancels strikes over pay and working conditions, the organisation in charge of the UK capital’s public transport warned.

Transport for London said there would be limited services on the Underground on Sunday and “little to no service” on the network between Monday and Thursday because of the walkouts by the RMT union.

The strikes, which began on Sunday morning, are the first across the entire Underground network since March 2023. Services are expected to return to normal by late Friday morning.

A strike on the Docklands Light Railway is expected to close that system — which serves east London — on Tuesday and Thursday.

Strikes by drivers working for First Bus are likely to disrupt some routes in north-west, west and south-west London between Friday September 12 and Sunday September 14. First Bus is one of the contractors running London’s red bus services.

The Underground strikes, announced last month, will be the most disruptive action.

Ahead of the start of the strikes, Claire Mann, TfL chief operating officer, called on the union to suspend the planned action and return to talks. She said the RMT had not put management’s pay offer to its members.

“Our pay deal is in line with other offers accepted by the RMT across the rail industry, so it is disappointing the RMT is planning to disrupt Londoners without giving their members a say on the offer,” she said.

TfL said it had offered Underground staff a 3.4 per cent annual increase, in line with retail price inflation, in February.

The union said, when announcing the strikes, that management had refused to engage seriously with union demands on pay, fatigue management, extreme shift patterns and a reduction in the working week.

There were 1.22bn journeys on the Underground in the year to March.

The Elizabeth line, London Overground and Croydon Tramlink are expected to run normally.

However, TfL warned some services could be very crowded during the stoppage and there might be disruption in some places where those services shared stations with the Underground. Mainline rail services will be unaffected.