Markets Magazine
Silicon Valley’s Quest to Defy Death May Make Inequality Worse
Best-selling author and historian Yuval Harari sees threats to the 20th century’s egalitarian projects.
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Death is the great equalizer, right? It always has been, but Silicon Valley might be changing that.
More and more tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists see the effort to extend life as the next big thing. “Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem,” billionaire Peter Thiel, the Facebook director and PayPal mafia member, wrote in the foreword to a book on longevity a few years back. More recently, Bill Maris, who invests hundreds of millions of Google’s dollars, told Bloomberg Markets magazine, “I just hope to live long enough not to die.”