The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What if They Could?
From the Kremlin to Silicon Valley, some of the most powerful people in the world now want something more: eternal life.
By Mark O’Connell
One day, two emperors — the emperor of China and the emperor of Russia — were walking side by side through the Forbidden City. As they walked, their steps cushioned by an embroidered carpet of red and gold, their retinues followed along behind in cheerful deference. Both emperors were 72 years old, about the age at which the people they ruled over typically died. Though neither spoke the other’s language, they talked contentedly through their interpreters, of the possibility of cheating death.
At one point, the Chinese emperor remarked that while in the past it was rare for a person to live beyond 70, these days it was said that at 70, one was still a child. At this, the Russian emperor became more animated. It was possible now, he suggested, to take out an aging man’s heart or liver and to replace it with a new organ, so that in spite of his advancing years, the man would become younger and younger, and perhaps even evade death entirely.
Then the exchange stops abruptly, like one of the fractured clay tablets on which the ancient Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh is etched, ending the narrative. This fragmentary form only adds to the strange intensity of the moment, the sense of being party to a scene we were not supposed to glimpse, in which some secret about the nature of power is hinted at.
Perhaps you saw this video last September, when it went viral: The two most powerful autocrats in the world — Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, both of whom have been heads of state for well over a decade, and neither of whom shows any signs of intending to relinquish that power — caught by an interpreter’s hot mic discussing their own apparent shared desire for immortality...
Consider the tech billionaire: This is a man who has amassed unimaginable wealth through the disruption of economic and social relations. He has completely reshaped how we buy things, how we pay for them. He has changed how we interact with our fellow humans. He has restructured our brains and reordered the global economy, and is now creating the ultimate technology, the one that promises to do away, once and for all, with the need for human intellectual labor. Is it not right that such a man should buy his way out of death, that he should break this last tie that binds him to the fate of his fellow humans?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/magazine/eternal-life-longevity-world-leaders.html