Even the Rich Won’t Live Forever (Maybe)

“Death makes me very angry,” admits Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation and the fifth-richest person in the world (his net worth is $43 billion, according to Forbes). “It doesn’t make any sense to me. Death has never made any sense to me. How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?” Death may not make any sense, but perhaps it can be defeated? With that in mind, Ellison has set up a foundation dedicated to ending mortality, or at least to “understanding lifespan development processes and age-related diseases and disabilities.” They spend real money, too: the Ellison Medical Foundation gives out more than $40 million a year.

There are some people who want to live forever. Some of these people are very rich like Larry Ellison, venture capitalist Paul F. Glenn, Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, and Google’s Sergey Brin — and they’re throwing some of their money to fund research on how to do it. Itskov, for example, believes that it may be possible one day to transfer our personalities onto a nonbiological carrier, and Ellison’s biographer has said that Ellison sees death as “just another kind of corporate opponent he can outfox.” Best of luck with this, you guys.

Photo: Oracle PR

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