Nobody really knows what happens when you die.
But billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has a pretty good idea what will happen to him: his blood will be replaced with an organ preservation solution, his temperature cooled to around minus 196 degrees Celsius and his body stored in a vacuum-insulated metal cylinder at subfreezing temperatures, using liquid nitrogen.
At least, that is the plan.
The PayPal founder, with a $30 billion fortune, is one of a crop of increasingly wealthy and powerful billionaires whose vast fortunes — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos alone are collectively worth more than $1 trillion — are being used to shape the future of the planet.
Some, like Thiel, are using their billions to fund research aimed at extending the human lifespan — even defeating death. Others are more concerned with the lifespan of a rapidly warming Earth and are investing in everything from nuclear power to fart-defying vaccines to fight climate change.
Then there are those who see our future among the stars.
The red planet
“One day Mars will save Earth, I am certain of it,” Musk, whose wealth is estimated at $620b, said of the planet on which he hopes to die — ideally not on impact.
His timeframe for getting there has accelerated faster than a Cybertruck on an empty highway, since early predictions it could take 100 years to establish a self-sustaining civilisation.
Musk now expects to have one million people on Mars within 20 years and SpaceX employees are busy designing a Martian city.
The issue is not how to get there — Musk’s SpaceX has a reusable rocket he hopes will be up to the job — but everything after that. Humans cannot breathe the planet’s air without a spacesuit, drink its contaminated water — mostly subsurface ice — or handle its minus 30C surface temperatures.
Those problems are not insurmountable but Musk’s multibillion-dollar bet they can be solved in his lifetime is an ambitious one. NASA does not plan to even land a person on Mars until the 2040s.
Lost in space
In competitive spirit, Musk and Bezos are the Antonio Salieri and Ludwig van Beethoven of the skies.
In the short term Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin are competing to see who will get to the Moon first. Both have multibillion-dollar contracts with NASA to do just that.
SpaceX was to have conducted the first private flight around the moon for Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who memorably advertised online for a date to become “the first woman to travel to the moon”.
Delays killed Maezawa’s plan — and presumably his love life.
When Bezos, worth $380b, looks up at the night sky he sees a slightly different future to Musk.
Rather than seeking Earth 2.0, he says he wants to use space exploration to improve the home we already have.
Bezos hopes to find resources on other planets that can be used to fight Earth’s climate emergency and depletion of its own natural resources.
“There is no Plan B, we have to save Earth,” he said in a 2019 Blue Origin presentation.
That sentiment is not entirely aligned with his ambition to establish human space colonies in low Earth orbit, which he claims could house “trillions”.
Bunker life
While some billionaires believe the solution to Earth’s challenges lies in outer space, others want to go underground.
When Zuckerberg’s plans for a 5.5 million square metre compound on the Hawaiian island Kauai went public in 2023, the assumption was that the Meta chief, worth about $400b, was envisaging a future post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Similarly, reports that Kim Kardashian’s $60 million house included an underground bunker got her fans wondering what the entrepreneurial star, said to be worth more than $2b, knew that they did not.
But University of Queensland academics Katherine Guinness, Grant Bollmer and Tom Doig see things differently. They say these billionaires are “seeking to create entirely self-sustaining ecosystems” they can control.
Going nuclear
In Wyoming Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ start-up, Terrapower, is building what is being billed as “the most advanced nuclear facility in the world”.
Gates is putting a slice of his $170b fortune into nuclear power at a time when he and his Silicon Valley peers are developing hugely energy-intensive artificial intelligence software.
Terrapower, whose backers include legendary investor Warren Buffett, hopes to get the cheaper, smaller and – it says – safer reactors up in about five years.
At the same time Microsoft plans to restart the controversial Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.
Gates is just one tech titan breathing new life into the nuclear power industry. Bezos’ Amazon and Google are also buying up nuclear reactors.
For some, it is about reducing big tech’s carbon footprint and avoiding the worst-case scenario for a rapidly warming Earth. Others just want cheap and reliable energy.
Smelly cows
That the world’s tech billionaires are increasingly enmeshed with political power was on show at US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, where Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai occupied prime real estate historically reserved for former presidents and family.
But Trump’s climate-change scepticism is not necessarily shared by the billionaires, at least some of whom are well-versed in adapting their public politics to suit the political landscape.
Bezos is one of those investing in reducing global emissions. And he is doing it in the most amusing way possible: by backing a vaccine intended to reduce the amount of methane produced by cows — both by burping and farting — a significant contributor to global warming.
Bezos’ $15b Bezos Earth Fund is backing a UK project whose scientists believe the vaccine could reduce the amount of microbes in cows’ stomachs.
Who wants to live forever?
Then there are the uber wealthy who have one particular future in mind: their own.
US entrepreneur and venture capitalist Bryan Johnson is not a billionaire on paper — his $600m fortune is comparatively small change — but his commitment to extending his lifespan has been the focus of headlines because he is spending millions on everything from injecting his teenage son’s blood to the ominously named penis shockwave therapy.
Other biotech investors are less personal and more philanthropic. Priscilla Chan, a paediatrician and philanthropist better known as Zuckerberg’s other half, co-founded a biotech company with her husband.
One project Chan Zuckerberg Biohub has backed is an attempt to catalogue every cell type in the human body to create what has been dubbed “Wikipedia for cells”.
Bezos’ Breakout Ventures backs biotech companies aiming to “dramatically improve human health and the sustainability of our planet”, while Thiel has invested in The Methuselah Foundation, a not-for-profit medical charity that aims to make “90 the new 50”.
“Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem,” is how Thiel puts it.
And if death cannot be solved, well, there is always Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company also backed by Thiel. It promises to freeze people’s heads, bodies and even their pet dog, in the hope that future medical developments will enable them to be brought back to life.
Presumably at that point the defrosted billionaire can start all over again, carving out the future they want for us all.