Collapse Finance, Part 2: Longevity Capitalism—Life as an Asset Class

Till Wittwer, Trump Plaza Atlantic City Demolition, 10 Seconds in, 2021/2025.

Continued from Part 1

In September 2025, a hot microphone caught Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin exchanging thoughts on immortality as they walked toward a military parade in Beijing. “With the development of biotechnology,” Putin remarked, “human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live longer and longer, and even achieve immortality.” Xi responded that in this century it will be possible to live to 150. Two of the most powerful men in their seventies, presiding over two of the largest arrays of military force on earth, whispering about organ transplants and cellular renewal. The race for longer life is most certainly on.

Amidst a broader state of social, ecological, financial, and political collapse, the drive toward longer life has only sharpened. Collapse and longevity are advancing in step with each other. Longer life has typically been regarded as an unambiguous good, one of the few values that requires no argument, cutting across cultures and political traditions as the crowning achievement of modern medicine and economic progress. But something has shifted. As democratic institutions fray and welfare systems are dismantled, the systems that once distributed social protection across populations are coming apart.

Life expectancy, and the uncertainty surrounding it, no longer appears as a taken-for-granted universal good. What follows traces how (longer) life has been captured—how the uncertainty around life expectancy has become a new frontier of accumulation, a terrain on which capital extracts value from the very indeterminacy of biological time. The term “longevity capitalism” is coined to name this formation: a biopolitical and financial regime in which capital subsumes the temporality of life itself.1 Capital has long appeared to borrow the properties of living time—self-reproducing and oriented toward its own future. What “longevity capitalism” names is the moment this appearance becomes literal, when biological duration is no longer a metaphor for accumulation but its actual medium. This echoes, and inverts, Marx’s observation that capital “becomes an automatic subject,” one whose self-reproduction once depended on the appropriation of labor time.2 In longevity capitalism, it is biological time itself, the indeterminate duration of the living body, that capital has learned to move through and feed on.

The question of who gets to age, and on what terms, has never been simply biological. From nineteenth-century life insurance markets and actuarial statistics to the postwar welfare state, longer life was incorporated into a logic of population governance—rendered calculable, productive, conditional. As Melinda Cooper has shown, the welfare state reorganized life from birth to death, binding it to labor, to heteronormative family structures, and to the disciplined accumulation of entitlements. Access to longer life was always conditional on work, on productivity, on belonging to the right kind of body and the right kind of household.3

What has collapsed is not conditionality itself, but the collective infrastructure that, during the short historical parenthesis of Fordist employment and stable growth, partially managed it. In the face of the collapse of such arrangements, rapidly aging societies find themselves navigating defined-benefit pension schemes that have been replaced by defined-contribution arrangements that transfer risk to individuals; collective guarantees have given way to personal investment portfolios exposed to market volatility. Retirement today hinges less on what you contributed than on what you own. Under the Trump administration, 401(k) plans are now open to direct investment in private equity and cryptocurrency—this is transforming over $7 trillion in retirement savings into fuel for volatile, speculative markets.

At the extreme end of this dynamic, tech oligarchs such as Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman are channeling massive capital into the project of vanquishing biological aging altogether. Bezos backs Altos Labs, one of the most heavily funded biotechnology ventures in history, focused on cellular reprogramming—the attempt to reset cells to a more youthful state. Thiel funds cryonics and parabiosis. Altman has invested personally in cellular rejuvenation therapies. These figures also experiment in deregulated enclaves such as Vitalia in Próspera, a pop-up longevity city on the Caribbean island of Roatán, within a special economic zone where they can bypass standard regulatory approval altogether. Here, outside the reach of FDA oversight, participants undergo experimental treatments—from follistatin gene therapy and stem-cell injections to plasma transfusions and epigenetic reprogramming—while operating under a tax-free regime and self-selected regulatory frameworks. Their program is straightforward: no death, no tax, no democracy.

Living longer, for such individuals, is inseparable from the desire to keep holding onto what they already have. Under financialized capitalism, compounding wealth beyond any individual lifespan already functions as a form of defense against mortality—accumulation converting itself into time, property into duration. Assets become a way of extending ownership beyond death, projecting property and power beyond the biological horizon.4 Longevity capitalism radicalizes this logic. It is not enough that wealth outlives the body. The body itself must be extended to protect what it owns. Death, in this light, is politically charged: it presupposes succession, the redistribution and transfer of wealth, and the possibility, however faint, of a different order. Longevity capitalism promises to defer that possibility indefinitely. At its limit, the fantasy is a world in which the present hierarchy need never end. Longevity science is how that fantasy finds its technical form, how it achieves itself.

Push this logic far enough and you arrive at “longevity escape velocity.” The metaphor is borrowed from physics: just as a rocket must reach a precise speed to break free of the earth’s gravitational pull, biomedical progress must advance fast enough to outpace aging itself—extending life faster than it deteriorates, until death becomes indefinitely deferrable. Initially conceived by biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, it was taken up by transhumanist thinkers such as Ray Kurzweil, who sees in AI and biotechnology the route to functional immortality. This represents the scientific horizon of longevity capitalism, the point at which biological aging becomes an engineering problem to be solved and mastered.

One can find a more popular expression of this in Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur whose “Don’t Die” regimen was recently featured in a Netflix documentary. Don’t Die represents something different: longevity as lifestyle, personal discipline, and public performance. The regimen involves over a hundred daily supplements, strict caloric restriction, and continuous biomarker monitoring, at a cost of around $2 million a year. Johnson’s body has become a managed system: every input tracked, every deviation corrected. If we invoke Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between zoē, life in its bare biological form, stripped of political agency, and bios, politically qualified life within the polis, these efforts may appear to signal the triumph of the latter: a life curated by reason, technological optimization, and individual choice. Yet this very process erodes the thick, relational texture of bios, reducing the subject to an administered, optimized biological substrate. The pursuit of more life does not enrich bios; if anything, it empties it. Paradoxically, in the pursuit of more life, it is life itself that gets lost.

It is this hollowing-out that longevity capitalism, operating within the domain of collapse finance, both produces and requires. Thriving on projections of end-of-times scenarios, it is structurally dependent on the imminence of the end—the eschatological backdrop against which the promise of more life becomes infinitely, and infinitely deferably, valuable.5 It operates simultaneously as a speculative wager and an ideological belief, where the conquest of death is perpetually pending yet never fully achieved, a future breakthrough always promised but never verifiable.6

Yet such an eschatological orientation is not unprecedented. Late nineteenth-century Russian cosmists such as Nikolai Fedorov and Alexander Bogdanov offered a radically different notion of longevity. What was at stake for them was not an individual obsession but a collective moral imperative: a means of overcoming historical injustice, unifying the living and the dead, achieving universal harmony. The Federov-inspired rallying cry “Mortals of the world, unite!” recasts longevity as a vision of radical solidarity.7 What distinguishes their project from today’s longevity capitalism is not simply the collective versus the individual, but the relationship to the present: rather than seeking to perpetuate existing hierarchies indefinitely, the cosmists imagined longevity as a rupture—a transformation of the social and political order. In the face of collapse, we need a new politics of life and death, one capable of reclaiming longevity not as a speculative asset but as a collective horizon. 

Continued in Parts 3 and 4