The longevity economy and the financialization of ageing

The financialization of longer life is now actively managed through financial assets fed by AI diagnostics, age and geron-technologies, and health-monitoring systems that attract venture capital, consolidating a new financialized environment – one that replaces social care with privatized services. In the United States, new professional figures such as ‘longevity navigators’ have begun to pop up: consultants who promise to optimize both health and wealth in a single package, offering advice that fuses financial planning with biological self-management. At the same time, institutions such as the World Bank, OECD, and World Economic Forum (WEF) increasingly promote the development of a new ‘longevity economy’, reframing ageing in a manner detached from the traditional understanding of labor, and thus from retirement. For instance, the WEF frames the longevity economy as an opportunity, not a burden. A recent report, Future-Proofing (WEF, 2025), underscores the importance of continuous midlife upskilling or reskilling and strategies of accumulation and decumulation – warning of the risks to retirees of depleting their savings over decades. Their recommendations include flexible withdrawal plans, partial annuities for lifelong income, and phased retirement plans where individuals continue part-time work while gradually living off on savings. A central theme is to keep older people ‘active and engaged’, positioning participation in the labor market, skills training, and consumer activity as essential contributions to economic growth.

On the other hand, the World Bank (2024) and the OECD (2024) emphasize health as the driver of ‘productive ageing’, creating roadmaps that replace the notion of retirement as a cliff-edge with a vision of healthier, longer working lives. Here, flexible labour markets, proactive health investment, and smarter financial strategies for both accumulation and decumulation are presented as the pillars of ageing well – again binding longevity to productivity. This institutional narrative is echoed, and given a more nuanced theoretical framework, by one of the most influential longevity economists, Andrew Scott, author of The 100-Year Life (Scott and Gratton, Reference Scott and Gratton2016) and the Longevity Imperative (Scott, Reference Scott2024). For Scott, the traditional life stages – education, work, retirement – must be rearranged and reimagined as multi-phase cycles, emphasizing lifelong productivity and continuous self-upgrading. According to this theory, the ageing process is no longer linear but modular. It is a succession of transitions requiring uninterrupted skill development, investment planning, and biometric oversight. Scott argues that we should avoid medicalizing old age and instead treat it as a chance for continued purpose and vitality. He further stresses the importance of improving our health span – the years of healthy living – calling for an ‘evergreen economy’, where extended lifespans fuel growth, innovation, and social benefit. All these developments might seem fair, and even empowering, given the unsustainable realities of ageing today. But who can afford it and who is entitled to such existential and financial restructuring?

The guidelines for achieving such an evergreen economy sound outlandish at best. The vision produced by these institutions seems to presuppose a labor market capable of absorbing older workers, a welfare system robust enough to underwrite multiple transitions over the course of a life, and households equipped with private savings and investment portfolios. However, the reality, as we are experiencing (the last decade has been defined by persistently weakening growth), is that of unemployment, underemployment, precarious gig work, and shrinking social protections. Yet calls for lifelong reskilling or upskilling sound hollow when today’s labor markets cannot even provide secure employment for the young. In this sense, the ‘longevity economy’ discourse is profoundly misleading. On the one hand, it endorses the dismantling of the traditional categories of employment and retirement; on the other, it evades any serious reckoning with the question of value creation under contemporary capitalism. It somehow assumes that economic growth can be sustained by extending the working life, as if wealth accumulation were still primarily tethered to labor productivity. But again, today’s reality – marked by the deepening financialization of both economy and society – is quite different.

Randy Martin (2002; Reference Martin2015) notably argued that under financialization, finance is no longer merely an economic mechanism but a mode of social coordination and subject formation. In conditions of pervasive uncertainty, finance provides the language and infrastructure through which the future is imagined and acted upon (Samman, Reference Samman2019). Acquiring a political logic, finance converts collective promises such as democracy – but also welfare, and retirement – into financialised claims on uncertain futures (Meister, Reference Meister2021). This applies to broader transformation in capital accumulation, where wealth accrues less from labor than from the temporal appreciation of assets, while social reproduction is increasingly linked to inherited property such as housing (Piketty, Reference Piketty2014; Adkins, Cooper, and Konings, Reference Adkins, Cooper and Konings2020). The traditional laboring subject gives way to the speculative subject, whose well-being rests not on wages alone but on the capacity to manage risk and sustain appreciation – reputational, financial, and affective – over time (Feher, Reference Feher2021; Rosamond, Reference Rosamond2020; Komporozos-Athanasiou, Reference Komporozos-Athanasiou2022).

As welfare systems contract, longevity is privatized. In this sense, financial capital does not simply circulate value; it scripts life courses, shaping how longevity is experienced and valued. Under longevity capitalism, these tendencies intensify. It is clearer to see how older workers are in no way a new frontier of productivity. They are rather a reserve of financial consumers. Their pensions, savings, and homes are valued less for sustaining livelihoods than for their capacity to be securitized as financial assets. The ‘longevity economy’, in this sense, not only fails to recognize the structural transformations of capitalism but also deepens the dependence of ageing populations on volatile financial circuits, converting longevity itself into a new site of speculative value extraction instead of securing it as a collective good sustained by the infrastructures of care.

Nowhere is this clearer than in recent U.S. pension reforms. For instance, under the Trump administration, the Department of Labor issued new rules allowing retirement plans, especially 401(k)s, to invest directly in private equity, real estate, and even cryptocurrency. With over $7 trillion in assets held in 401(k) plans, this policy effectively transforms vast pools of retirement savings into fuel for high-risk financial instruments (Braun and Durand, Reference Braun and Durand2025). What was once a mechanism of intergenerational redistribution and collective security is thus reframed as an individualized investment strategy – one increasingly dependent on volatile markets and speculative returns. This marks not simply a policy shift but a paradigmatic reorientation, with retirement itself becoming financialized, exposing ageing populations to the instabilities of asset appreciation. Such a move reveals the deeper logic connecting financial capitalism to longevity capitalism – a regime where the temporal fact of people living longer is converted into a frontier for speculative accumulation.

Silicon dreams and longevity escape velocity

This speculative orientation finds its sharpest expression in Silicon Valley. At the intersection of venture capital and biotech futurism lies the fantasy that ageing – and even death – is nothing more than a technical glitch to be hacked. In this sense, longevity capitalism rests on an ideology of mastery: it promises control over mortality while concealing its dependence on vast extractive infrastructures – of capital, labor, and biological resources (Pasquinelli, Reference Pasquinelli2023). Clearly, the anti-ageing project is not merely biomedical but politically reactionary, recasting longevity science as a frontier for elite reproduction and private accumulation rather than collective security.

Already in 2013, Larry Page famously launched his company ‘Calico’ with the goal of extending human life and curing the diseases of ageing. That same year, Time magazine posed the following question on its front cover: ‘Can Google Solve Death?’ Page was among the first Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to pour serious money into life extension – a field originally seen as speculative, fringe, and largely unprofitable. This time has changed. The longevity sector has rapidly matured, attracting significant venture capital and spawning a new class of biotech startups devoted to delaying or even reversing ageing. Among these new actors is Bryan Johnson, who, after founding the brain-interface company Kernel and the science-focused venture fund OS Fund, has turned his attention toward human longevity through his highly publicized self-experimentation project, Blueprint. His extreme regimen – recently showcased in a Netflix documentary – embodies this ethos, channeling both personal wealth and investment into the promise of longevity, and positioning ageing itself as the next great frontier of capitalist innovation.

Techno-entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Jeff Bezos extend this logic further, channeling vast resources into ventures that promise to transcend biological limits. Thiel, an early investor in leading gerontologist Aubrey de Grey’s SENS Research Foundation and Ambrosia, has reportedly funded Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a leading cryonics company preserving bodies and brains for future revival. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has invested millions in Retro Biosciences, a longevity startup that raised over $180 million to pursue cellular reprograming and plasma-based rejuvenation therapies. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos has co-founded Altos Labs, one of the most heavily capitalized players in the field, with initial funding estimated at $3 billion, focused on reversing cellular ageing through reprograming technologies. Longevity here is not pursued as a universal good but rather as a form of personal and capital reproduction – a project in which wealth and life itself are folded into a speculative network, and in which the dream of immortality remains a prerogative of the few.

For instance, venture capitalist Oleg Teterin, founder of Longevity InTime, has launched a startup developing online health-tracking technologies designed to predict and prevent disease – services explicitly tailored to a select group of high-net-worth clients. As Teterin candidly noted, ‘these high-net-worth individuals are mostly the same target audience as our potential investors’ (Sullivan, Reference Sullivan2020). This remark highlights an elite-driven shift in which longevity is recast as a speculative frontier, tied to wealth and class reproduction. The wealthy invest to secure it for themselves first, offering it to others only later, if at all. This dynamic shows how longevity is increasingly secured as a privilege of the wealthy, who invest in life-extension as both consumers and financiers; it is precisely in this elite pre-emption of the future that the ‘asset condition’ of financialized capitalism becomes most visible (Davies, Reference Davies2024).

The notion that longevity might be reserved for a chosen few is part of a wider epistemological turn – one that increasingly naturalizes hierarchy and inequality. As Quinn Slobodian (Reference Slobodian2025) has recently illustrated, the shift toward pseudo-scientific biological determinism and genetic enhancement has deep historical roots and was central to reinforcing a neoliberal political order increasingly detached from democratic oversight in the post–Cold War era. Rather than responding to democratic demands, the neoliberal elites, and capital holders, started constructing insulated enclaves where market logic is combined with pseudoscientific narratives of inherent human inequality. The ideological spine of this transformation relies heavily on scattered and quasi-scientific notions from evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and cognitive science. Figures such as the American political scientist Charles Murray have argued that liberal assumptions of universal human potential were fundamentally flawed, suggesting instead that traits such as intelligence and moral capacity are significantly predetermined by genetics and hence largely immutable. The resulting claim they advance is quite speculative and in fact quite shocking: if inequality is biologically inherent, redistribution through social policy becomes ineffective and ethically unjustified (Herrnstein and Murray, Reference Herrnstein and Murray1994).

Again, this ideology also resonates within the current U.S. political landscape, where the Trump administration has aligned itself with anti-regulatory and techno-libertarian currents that undermine traditional public health. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now serving as Secretary of Health, exemplifies this convergence. A longevity enthusiast and vocal vaccine sceptic, he has championed rapid biotech rollouts while being openly sceptical about the legitimacy of FDA oversight and long-term clinical trials. Silicon Valley’s techno-elite exemplify this biologized vision of longevity capitalism, aggressively investing in bodily optimization, with the goal of extending and expanding their own biological (and thus human) and economic capital. The current landscape of innovation – defined by exclusive patents and private clinics – does not dispense life-enhancing technologies based on public health needs but operates as a privatized domain accessible only through significant wealth.

These elites are not merely striving for longer lives, which again remain naturally elusive, but for the institutionalization of their superiority, replicating themselves as a biologically enhanced, asset-owning class. Their ambition also includes a territorial dimension. Through the creation of new ‘longevity cities’ within Special Economic Zones – such as the Prospera enclave in Honduras – they establish deregulated spaces with tax exemptions where experimental treatments, from cryotherapy to stem cell injections, can take place outside the regulation or oversight of public health authorities and the constraints of scientific trials. These reactionary elites are not simply pursuing personal health regimes; they are constructing infrastructures to shield their human and financial capital from the perceived threats of social democracy and redistribution. Their project, in essence, is one of no death, no tax, no democracy. Startups like Calico (Google), Altos Labs (Bezos), and Unity Biotechnology are not merely medical ventures; they are financial wagers on the future of human time.

Paradoxically, some of the ideas animating this speculative frenzy stem from the notion of ‘longevity escape velocity’ (LEV). Initially conceived by biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, this idea reflects the belief that advances in biomedical technology will soon outpace ageing itself – embodying the speculative impulse at the heart of this movement. Much like gravitational escape velocity refers to the speed needed to overcome the Earth’s gravity, longevity escape velocity denotes the rate at which technological progress must advance to outpace ageing. Supported by futurist and Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil, the concept of Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) asserts that we can extend life faster than we age – eventually achieving functional immortality. Kurzweil predicts that by the 2030s, advances in AI, nanotechnology, and biotechnology will enable humans to halt or even reverse ageing altogether. In this vision, AI is not merely an accelerator but an essential partner in enhancing – and ultimately transcending – the human mind and body. Advocates frame longevity escape velocity (LEV) as radically empowering, promising liberation from biological constraints. Relatedly, Ray Kurzweil’s transhumanist ideas find echoes in the work of Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov, who in 2011 launched the 2045 Initiative – a project outlining a technological pathway to human immortality through successive ‘avatars’: robotic surrogates, brain–computer interfaces, and ultimately the uploading of human consciousness into holographic or digital forms. Carrying a distinct science-fiction inflection, this sector of the emerging ‘immortality industry’ thrives on speculative technologies that are marketed simultaneously as visionary and commercially lucrative (Heffernan, Reference Heffernan2020).

Yet this pursuit of the transhuman reveals a deep paradox. In aiming to overcome ageing, these transhumanists increasingly surrender agency to science fiction and machines, outsource bodily regulation to algorithms, and withdraw into sanitized, privatized enclaves – protected from ecological collapse and political instability. Longevity here is not democratized but sequestered: a controlled life, not an emancipated one. One which reveals a morbid rather than a vital drive (Esposito, Reference Esposito2002; Hager, Reference Hager, Samman and Gammon2023). Starting from Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between zoē (bare biological life, stripped of context and political agency) and bios (politically qualified life within the polis), these efforts might at first appear to signal the triumph of bios. What is celebrated is a life curated by reason, technological optimization, and individual choice. However, this very process seems to erode the thick, relational fabric of bios, reducing the human being to an administered, optimized biological substrate. In this sense, life begins to resemble zoē – bare life, stripped of its political and communal entanglements, reduced to something that needs only be preserved and secured. The transhumanist project, aligned with what Lewis Mumford (Reference Mumford1967) theorized as a megamachine, risks producing ‘frozen, immutable, dead life under the sign of immortality’ (Samman et al., Reference Samman, Schwarz, Cornea, Dunn, Heffernan, Kirsch and Mendoza2023: 3).

Longevity capitalism does not simply promise to extend life; it abstracts it, and turns (later) life itself into a speculative object. The longer we live, the more disembodied our experience may become, mediated by AI that knows our desires better than we do, controlling inputs to our bodies and minds in the name of optimization. The body of the longevity investor, disciplined and detoxified, becomes a site of paradox: technologically empowered but politically and socially withdrawn. This raises profound questions about the meaning and possibility of political subjectivities and collective relations.

Longevity as eschatology

In this system, living longer becomes an ideological wager – a refusal to relinquish one’s capital and an attempt instead to emulate its properties. As shown by Sandy Hager, when viewed across a long historical spectrum that includes the role death once held in archaic societies, today’s longevity capitalism represents the apogee of death denial: it banishes death from social life and transforms capital accumulation into a defence mechanism against mortality (Hager, Reference Hager, Samman and Gammon2023; see also Becker, Reference Becker2014). In its financialized form, longevity capitalism thus cultivates a distinctive form of apocalyptic thinking – one that seeps into finance itself, where the end of life, like capital, must be endlessly ‘rolling’ (Samman and Sgambati, Reference Samman and Sgambati2022). It promises liberation through the indefinite postponement of death, conjuring a future in which ageing – and death – are always just around the corner: imminent yet perpetually deferred. In this sense, longevity assumes a peculiar, ever-revolving eschatological form – death is continually invoked but never fully confronted. The pursuit and promise of longevity, of course, is not new. Across human history, it has surfaced in spiritual, philosophical, and scientific traditions alike – from ancient quests for immortality and alchemical searches for the elixir of life to Enlightenment dreams of perfectibility and modern regenerative medicine.

Late nineteenth-century Russian Cosmists such as Nikolaj Fedorov and Aleksandr Bogdanov offered a radically different yet prescient eschatological notion of longevity. Far from treating longevity as a private obsession, they presented it as a collective political project and task, rooted in the conviction that the overcoming of death was humanity’s ‘common task’. They believed that science and technological advancement could serve as a means of human emancipation, unifying the living with the dead as a path toward universal harmony. Federov’s rallying cry – ‘Mortals of the World, Unite!’ – reconceives longevity as a vision of radical solidarity, seeing the extension of life as a universal human destiny tied to collective emancipation and the transformation of society itself. While the Cosmist project remained marginal, its fusion of science, spirituality, and utopian politics gave impetus to what became the Soviet revolutionary project. To confront longevity capitalism, we need not only new financial and technological innovations, but a new politics of life and mortality.