I tell the impeccably polite receptionist that I’m here to speak to Giles Mackay. For the last three months I have been reporting on his affordable housing company, Heylo, which owns and operates 10,100 “shared ownership” homes (a type of affordable housing where you part-buy, part-rent your home from a social landlord) across the UK. Mackay, an entrepreneur who claims to have established 13 businesses, amassed these properties with debt, including at least £52 million of public money and £532 million from private investors. Earlier this year, something spooked the investors and they pulled out of the scheme. Now, Mackay’s portfolio is coming undone — and the cash he owes may not be recovered. 

The receptionist’s answer is disappointing, even though it’s the one I expected. “He’s not in,” she says. “He lives in Monaco and comes into the office when his schedule allows.”

The crisis at Heylo has gripped the social housing world since March, when I revealed in Inside Housing that two asset-owning subsidiaries of the business had entered administration. Together these two companies own 3,450 homes, all of which are occupied and are now expected to be sold to new owners by the administrators. Heylo is therefore likely to lose a third of its homes at a stroke — and there is no guarantee they will end up in the hands of another social landlord. Residents have been assured that they will not lose their homes, but the administrators are not required to keep them in the social housing sector, so they could end up sold to a private owner.

Since they provide homes for people on low incomes, a level of responsibility is expected from social housing landlords. If you open your books to officials, and demonstrate good governance and sound finances, you can access the benefits of regulation including government grants to buy new homes. Heylo stretched this principle to breaking point. Mackay bought a dormant social landlord and created an elaborate structure where his homes sat in unregulated investment companies. The result was that Heylo could receive public funds and sidestep scrutiny, all while generating big profits. In its most recently published accounts, for 2023-24, the overarching Heylo Group recorded post-tax profits of £39.4 million. There is an extraordinary contrast between Mackay himself, whose personal life revolved around mansions and raucous parties, and his thousands of lower-middle income residents who now face an uncertain future. (Mackay was also approached for comment for this article by email.)

Although it may be the most extreme example, Heylo is one of a wave of “for-profit” affordable housing landlords in England backed by billions of pounds in private capital. Should ministers be encouraging this? Are big profits compatible with providing social homes? This debate will only intensify as new investors flood in, lured by the government’s new £39 billion grant program for affordable housing. Heylo’s unraveling is a reminder that however genuine these investors’ social purpose may be, their residents will come second and their returns will come first.

Giles Patrick Cyril Mackay, now aged 64, was born in 1962. He passed the bar aged 21 and quickly moved into structured finance. In 1985 he founded Assettrust, the first in a series of companies that would help businesses such as Ford and Sainsbury’s sell and lease back their properties. In 1999 he founded Hometrack, a property data business which he sold to Zoopla in 2017 for £120 million.

In the last 15 years, newspaper coverage of Mackay has focused just as much on eye-popping stories from his personal life as it has on his businesses. In 2012, a court ruled that he had bullied the contractors building his Chelsea mansion and was ordered to pay £2.3 million. “My middle name is relentless,” he had warned the builders in an email criticizing delays and defects. “Guess what, when I have forgotten about you in a year’s time enjoying my £100m home or sailing on one of my 40 meter yachts — you’ll still be trying to wind up some other poor unsuspecting customer with your brand of mediocrity — a sad loser.”

Mackay’s former wife Caroline accused him of not revealing his full wealth following the breakdown of their marriage in 2015. After they divorced, he became notorious for hosting parties at his London home with girlfriends including his now-wife, Yfke Sturm, a Dutch model, with whom he has at least one child.

Those who lived near Mackay called him the “poshest neighbor from hell”. In 2018, he held a Nostradamus-themed end of the world party with flamethrowers, dry ice and a laser light show. He was fined £7,500 for breaching a noise abatement order and accused of “total disregard for his neighbors”. He moved to Monaco in 2023, shortly after selling his Chelsea home to the president of the United Arab Emirates for £65 million.

There is considerable suspicion about Mackay among the senior leaders in the social housing sector I have spoken to. One describes him as “incredibly forthright with his opinions” and always focused on “what’s best for Giles”, although he concedes, with a note of awe, that he is “bloody good with numbers” and was ahead of his time on the importance of housing data and valuations. Another warily called his business model “not vanilla” shared ownership and “more of a DIY product”, with less regulatory oversight and protection for residents. All agree, though, that Heylo’s model is an outlier in the affordable housing landscape and that Mackay is trying to do something different, with a more aggressively “for-profit” structure than other social landlords. 

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A former associate takes a more sympathetic view. Mackay is a “very intense yet respectful guy”, he tells me, whose “mind works at a thousand miles an hour”. He comes from a “legal, banking perspective” which is the “opposite” of most of the social housing sector, a profession people traditionally enter to make a difference rather than to make big profits. “That alone doesn’t make him a bad guy, but I can see why it would fuel some negativity and concern,” he says. Affordable housing is “the biggest supply and demand opportunity” for a business and Mackay is “creating new supply” when cash-strapped non-profit housing associations aren’t buying new homes. Are Heylo’s residents being exploited? No, he says. They chose to live in their homes and got the chance to own a stake through the business.

Mackay’s involvement in the social housing sector goes back to 2003 when he founded Assettrust Housing, a precursor to Heylo. A 2004 article in The Times captures the pitch: “Let’s give a big hand to the company with a plan for building affordable housing in the most expensive parts of England, without any help from the taxpayer.” Mackay, the article says, “has a genius for creating financial solutions to complex problems”; his social housing venture, we are told, “is not a charitable gesture, but a serious business proposition”.

Like Heylo, Assettrust Housing was focused on shared ownership. The company used private finance from backers such as RBS to buy new-build homes from house builders. It amassed a portfolio of just under 800 homes before its 18 subsidiary companies fell into administration during the 2013-14 financial year. Mackay had got into a dispute with his investors, who appointed the administrators to protect their capital. Following the administrations, in 2014 Assettrust’s homes were sold to a mix of landlords within the affordable housing sector. One-third were sold to Heylo, Mackay’s new company. 

Twelve years on, the situation at Heylo is strikingly similar. Once again, it was the lenders who pulled the plug. According to PwC, the Heylo subsidiaries defaulted on their loan terms, which led the investors to conclude that a consensual solution was “no longer achievable”. The same person who did the administration of Assettrust Housing — David Baxendale at PriceWaterhouseCoopers — is now leading the Heylo administrations. (PwC has assured the residents they will not lose their homes and should continue to pay their mortgage and rent as usual.)

Yet the collapse of the Heylo subsidiaries is on a different scale to Assettrust. The two affected Heylo companies owe £532 million to BlackRock, the giant US asset manager, and two pension funds, Phoenix Life and the Universities Superannuation Scheme. There is another crucial difference: the two Heylo companies owe a total of £52 million to Homes England, the government’s housing agency. This cash was granted to Heylo between 2018 and 2022 to help purchase its homes. Public grant for shared ownership housing is typically repayable once residents have “staircased” up to buy full ownership of their home, but it will be lost if a buyer is not willing to pay a sufficient price for Heylo’s homes.

Attention is now turning to the value of the 3,450 homes hanging in the balance. The administrators have appointed an independent valuer to estimate how much the homes are worth, and therefore how much the companies’ creditors will be repaid. According to Heylo’s own estimate, its homes were worth enough to repay both companies’ debts in full. PwC’s estimation may differ. But valuations are only a guide, and how much the creditors — including the taxpayer — will receive back will be decided by the ultimate buyer of the homes and how much it is willing to pay. 

What are the lessons from all this? First, regulators were powerless to stop the Heylo crack-up. England’s Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) has expressed reservations about Mackay’s model for years. Assettrust had tried to use a registered social landlord to access the benefits of regulation, including bidding for public money, but was rebuffed by the regulator, which criticized its governance and viability. However, under a deregulation package introduced by the government in 2017, Heylo was able to buy an existing registered provider and attach it to its investment structure — bypassing the need to go through a registration process. Eventually, in 2022, the regulator deemed Heylo’s registered provider non-compliant, warning it did not sufficiently safeguard its social housing assets. But regulators never had oversight of the wider Heylo Group, or the investment companies that actually own the homes public money paid for. 

A spokesperson for the RSH says: “This case reinforces the importance of meeting debt obligations. It also shows the importance of landlords having robust risk management arrangements and control over the social housing they provide. It highlights the need to follow our full registration process, rather than acquiring an existing provider, so we can identify potential issues with a landlord’s business arrangements at the outset.”

Second, Heylo is a cautionary tale in a wider story: the rise of “for-profit” affordable housing providers backed by private capital. Since 2008, successive governments in England have encouraged investors to enter the social housing sector on the basis that public money alone will not be enough to address the huge demand for affordable homes. There are now 85 for-profit registered providers, backed variously by high-octane private equity such as Blackstone and more “patient capital” such as local government pension funds. They own just 1.6% of England’s total affordable housing stock, but were responsible for 13% of new completions last year. Heylo may be unique or it may be a harbinger of things to come. Either way, its size — it completed 804 homes in 2024-25, making it England’s third-fastest growing for-profit provider — means it cannot be ignored.

The RSH says it does not have a problem with for-profit providers per se; it points out that it has awarded other large for-profit providers owned and operated by Legal & General, Universities Superannuation Scheme and M&G top marks. These companies are not charities. To me, at least, profit is not in and of itself a bad thing; but what is crucial is how for-profits are structured, and where their profits flow. In the case of L&G, for example, an affordable housing investment structure is enriching thousands of pension policyholders. In Heylo’s case, the structure is set up to enrich one enormously wealthy man.

“The team at Heylo Housing is working closely with the administrators, and our customers remain our top priority to ensure a smooth and orderly transition,” Heylo said in its original statement on the announcement of the administrations last month. “As this is an ongoing matter, we are unable to comment further at this stage.”

Mackay will be alright: relentless is his middle name, after all. But his story should be studied closely before the government opens the door to more state-backed super-rich social landlords. If you mix social housing with profit-chasing, the biggest winners could be the ones in Monaco and Chelsea Harbour.

The leader of this movement in the United States was Robert Crumb, a fogeyish eccentric whose explicit visions lit up hippy San Francisco. In addition to his big asses, visitors to the Pompidou will see Crumb’s early hit Zap Comix, with its cover promising “gags, jokes, kozmic trooths”, and Dirty Laundry Comics, a Seventies collaboration where Crumb and his late wife Aline depict themselves nude while a lady in the background yells “Get dressed!”.

Raised by a sadistic father and amphetamine-addicted mother, Crumb’s cartoons were both a means of escape and a vital outlet for the toxicity of his Philadelphia childhood. His elder brother, Charles, became a tormented recluse who lived with his mother and bathed once every six weeks, while his younger brother, Maxon, admitted to a history of molesting women. That Crumb transcended such horrors is a miracle.

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In spite of, or perhaps because of, his sordid obsessions, Crumb became the most unlikely ladies’ man since Philip Larkin. With his big, eye-warping glasses, moustache, fedora, nasal whinge and jutting Adam’s apple, Crumb resembled at once a grandfather and a teenage boy. He prowled the epicentre of the hippy movement but preferred blues to psychedelic music, and eschewed long hair and bell-bottoms for the look of an insurance salesman. “I have a compulsion to reveal the truth about myself, for better or for worse,” he told the Louisiana Literature Festival in 2019. “Maybe it’s like a guy who exposes himself in public.”

At what point did this underground icon — described by the critic Robert Hughes as “a kind of American Hogarth” — emerge into the mainstream? Perhaps it was 2009, when Harold Bloom reviewed his graphic novel adaptation of the Book of Genesis in the New York Review of Books? Or else 2018, when a drawing of his character Fritz the Cat sold at auction for $717,000?

In fact, the cartoonist’s apotheosis came in 1994, with the release of Crumb. This remarkable documentary shows why all his lurid depravity matters: Crumb is an artist who draws utterly without fear, putting his darkest fantasies and prejudices on the page. His productions tread the line between art and porn, art and trash, from depictions of industrialisation and louche spiritual gurus to fantasies about nuns who want to chop off his penis. In today’s media landscape, when so much time is devoted to second-guessing how something will be received before it has even taken shape, it is almost impossible to imagine someone making art as provocative and uninhibited as Crumb’s. In one strip from Zap Comix titled “You may not think it’s funny, but I’ve got a morbid sense of humour”, a bespectacled artist resembling Crumb guffaws and sketches a woman as she is crushed by a bus.

In his early work, Crumb lifted the cute look of early 20th-century cartoons from the Fleischer Brothers, honed from a job at a greetings card company, and gave them an LSD-fuelled twist. One story depicts a spate of mysterious meatball attacks that are thrown from off-camera and change the personalities of their victims. (“Respected men in high places were getting hit,” it reads. “Bertrand Russell got hit.”) It escalates into a full-on downpour as meatballs rain over Los Angeles. Another, “Joe Blow”, mimics the style of a homely Fifties sitcom until its nuclear family descends into an incestual orgy.

Yet Crumb also embraced terrible racist caricatures from the Thirties and Forties. In the 1994 documentary, the journalist Deirdre English tears apart one of Crumb’s strips, the excruciatingly titled “Ooga-Booga”, calling it “a mockery of black people, a vomiting-up of Crumb’s own racism, his own deepest hostilities and fears”. Crumb’s insistence on playing with racist imagery has lost him friends: fellow cartoonist Art Spiegelman stopped speaking to him after he drew a story called “When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America”. “When it comes into my head, I think ‘Oh I gotta do it’,” Crumb said in 2019. “I’m gonna get hell for it, but I know I have to do it.”

The generous interpretation of these strips is that he is simply bringing out into the open stereotypes that are already simmering in the cultural soup. “I use the old-time comic stereotypes to reveal myself to myself,” he wrote in the introduction to one of his art books. “I don’t believe Crumb’s a racist for one second,” says Steve Marchant, learning coordinator at the Cartoon Museum in London. “You can compare the golliwog-style drawings in some of his comics to the beautiful illustrated trading cards he did about 20 years ago about blues legends of America… really nice, sensitive cartoon portraits of all of his heroes.”

Crumb was also criticised for his fetishistic depictions of sexual violence. Whether female cartoonists sided with him (Lynda Barry was one of his main supporters) or against him (Trina Robbins was outspokenly anti-Crumb), they were undeniably influenced by his autobiographical narratives. Here, again, I sense the overwhelming alienness of the Sixties: a lot of the media that was considered edgy or liberating back then would now be dismissed as sexist. Plus Crumb’s art is not without self-criticism: in 1992, he drew “The R. Crumb Dartboard”, a caricature of himself as a predatory goon for his angry female readers to cut out and assail with darts. (“Have at me, girls!”) “He’s never cast himself in a glamorous light, both in the way that he draws himself and in the things that in his stories you see him doing or thinking about doing,” says Marchant. “He’s always his own worst critic.”

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“I think it is the role of cartoonists across the spectrum to lower the tone,” says political cartoonist Martin Rowson. His business is satire, to hurl rocks at the establishment. Crumb, he suggests, occupied a similar niche initially, as his subversive comics snuck into beatnik hangouts and children’s bedrooms. “We are not artists. We are something else.” He points out that the pioneering political cartoonists of the 18th century, such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, also drew pornography. Apart from a “really boring” and conventional comic adaptation of the Book of Genesis, Rowson says, “I can’t think of a single Crumb image I’ve seen which has bored me. It’s disturbed me, it’s amazed me, it’s delighted me, but it’s never bored me.” By contrast, he says, “an awful lot of contemporary comics are just badly drawn people standing talking to each other”.

Everywhere you look in modern comics, Crumb’s inky fingerprints are visible. Take the monochrome comics journalism of Joe Sacco, which oozes Crumb-like confessional. More recent small-press comics and graphic novels have used the biographical elements and shock tactics Crumb pioneered to talk about atrocities, trauma and sexual assault in a far more earnest, 21st-century way. “A form that is built around stereotypes… has become one of the main mediums by which the world’s most disenfranchised populations have their stories documented and recorded,” says Dominic Davies, senior lecturer at City, University of London. We’re a long way from “Ooga-Booga“. You can see why even Crumb might be tempted to start self-censoring: a New York Times interviewer in 2022 proposed that he is now “gazing less directly at a bigoted, violent world and instead examining his distance from it”.

“It’s always possible to do everything,” says Rowson; “it’s a question of whether it gets published. And even in the last five to 10 years, what can and cannot get published has shifted.” There are still plenty of weirdos making depraved small-press comics today, such as James Unsworth’s venereal ninja turtle orgies and Maia Matches’s BDSM-loving character “Bitch“. Then there is a more well-known British successor: Viz. From the Fat Slags to more up-to-date parodies (a turtleneck-wearing forager called Foodie Bollocks, a Right-wing conspiracy nut called The Male Online), the comic is “very much channelling” the spirit of Crumb, Marchant says.

Crumb’s sensibility “has now leached into the water supply, like the acid they were meant to have thrown into the reservoirs in the Sixties,” says Rowson. “It’s got there, and it’s the sea through which we swim.” His work has a dark honesty, revealing a side of human nature that tends to go unexamined in the name of good manners. And comics, with their ability to elicit shock and laughter at the same time, are the perfect medium to express it. Thirty years on from his documentary, Crumb’s story must be revisited: it is a convincing case that, now more than ever, we need mavericks who scorn civility and create without fear.

Home to one of the world’s highest concentrations of scientific talent, Altos Labs is pursuing a lavishly funded quest to unearth the secrets of ageing. The Stanford-meets-Soho House décor is enough to show that here, health is wealth. But even in the notoriously well-compensated field of biotechnology it stands out. Last year, the Silicon Valley venture revealed it had raised $3 billion from investors, making it one of the best-financed start-ups in history.

Its mission? Depending on who you ask, anything from reversing chronic diseases and deferring the helpless twilight of old age to cutting the keys of eternal youth and creating a race of immortal supreme beings. This furrow of science, which piques our hardwired anxiety of ageing and fear of death, has always been accompanied by disproportionate incentives for hype. Nor has it been helped by wealthy obsessives, who in recent years have very publicly taken their own anxiety to macabre new heights, such as the software entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who injected himself with his son’s blood and spends $2 million a year in the hope of achieving the body of an 18-year-old.

Altos’s leaders, however, are in the business of managing expectations. Hans Bishop, the president, has said his focus is on increasing “healthspan” rather than lifespan, and that any extension in longevity would be “an accidental consequence”. The idea is that, by focusing on “reprogramming” cells with various proteins, Altos can find medicines that treat many diseases at once by targeting the underlying problem: ageing.

Bishop and his co-founders Rick Klausner and Yuri Milner are late entrants in the arena of anti-ageing research. Calico was set up a decade ago by Google co-founder Larry Page, though it has yet to unveil a product. Other players include Unity, BioAge, BioViva and AgeX Therapeutics. Billionaires — including Milner himself, Page, and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel — are regularly glimpsed behind the scenes.

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So what makes Altos stand out? Again, that war chest is immense. Its team is a fleet of Nobel prizewinners, lured from governments and top universities with the promise of “sports star” salaries. As for famous backers, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos himself is believed to be one of Altos’s investors. When rumours of Bezos’s involvement broke in 2021, fellow billionaire Elon Musk quipped: “If it doesn’t work, he’s gonna sue death!”

Altos is global, with two hubs in California, one in England near Cambridge, and one in Japan led by famous stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka. Given that all my imaginative efforts to visualise these mines of youth ended with giant brains in tanks, I am intrigued to be offered a tour of the UK hub by the building’s owners. My goal is to peer a little closer through the hype and see what $3 billion gets you.

Upstairs in the Cambridge branch, I am taken past rows of brand-new labs and a sterile area named the Science Kitchen, where some of the 160 scientists prepare for experiments on, among other specimens, mice and fruit flies. (You may recall from biology lessons that drosophilas are ideal for research since their rapid life cycle allows multiple generations to be bred in a single day.)

A vivarium, for raising and keeping animals, is being built downstairs, but I am refused entry as it is still undergoing environmental testing. It must be signed off by the Home Office, the facilities manager explains. Of all government departments, why that one? An answer is not forthcoming.

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Science is a power-hungry enterprise, as evidenced by the colossal HVAC system out back, almost the size of the lab itself. The whole building is kept on backup power so that if there is an outage on the National Grid, Altos can continue to keep its industrial-strength freezers at -70°C. As we pass a room of these freezers, I point out that they are conveniently human-sized. “Is Walt Disney in that one?” I ask. No one laughs.

The superlative sci-fi element, however, is “Ken’s Egg”: a wood-panelled, 130-person lecture theatre on the ground floor named after Dr Ken Raj, one of the principal investigators. “I felt the egg was good,” Raj says. “What the auditorium is for is to bring our ideas, to give birth to life.”

Those ideas continue to advance. Raj, alongside his colleague Steve Horvath in the US, is an expert in epigenetics, measuring how molecules called methyl groups attach themselves to our DNA as we age. Most people’s DNA methylation age corresponds accurately with their chronological age, but those with diseases such as Parkinson’s have an older epigenetic age.

A couple of years ago, the big question was whether the methyl groups are driving the ageing process, or merely a consequence of it. Now, we know. “We can see now that yes, the methylation is actually the driver,” Raj tells me. “Not all of the methylation that happens in your genome drives ageing, but there are methylation genomes that actually do the driving.”

Some aspects of the science being pursued at Altos are more controversial than others. Charles Brenner, department chair at City of Hope medical centre in Los Angeles and a vocal critic of lifespan-extending hype, tells me that there is “a cart-horse problem” with DNA methylation. “There’s no evidence to my knowledge that a change in [epigenetic clock] means that a person is going to live longer,” he says.

Brenner says that epigenetic resetting “is real and will certainly turn into real medicine”, such as when your cells are used to create a tissue that has an exact genetic match for, say, your damaged liver. In vivo “reprogramming”, however, is in his opinion “unlikely to ever be tested in humans” because “everyone who works with these genes knows that they produce tumours and teratomas in the process of producing well-behaved stem cells”.

At conferences, Brenner shows his audience a letter from an anti-ageing scientist who claimed: “We can control ageing at our caprice… it’s going to revolutionise everything.” It was written in 1990. “It arguably could have been said by any anti-ageing biotech guy in the last 33 years,” he says. “And they were all wrong.” Despite this, Brenner expects that the “excellent scientists” at Altos will still “discover useful things”. However, he says, “it’s not obvious to me what new technologies would making drugging the ageing process to achieve lifespan extension suddenly possible. I suspect that some of the investors were sold a bill of goods.”

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The political and ethical questions around Altos Labs are equally unsettled. The debates are familiar by now. Proponents see the quest for longevity as morally noble, arguing that it will eventually benefit all humanity. Detractors say there’s no evidence to suggest the benefits would trickle down to the non-billionaires.

David Sinclair, chief executive of the International Longevity Centre UK, tells me the key challenge is “helping us live better now rather than longer, and that is arguably a policy issue as much as a science issue”. The cynical view of Altos and its ilk, he says, is that there are “quite a lot of men in their 30s who want to live forever, and that they’re throwing lots of money into this. Actually, if you asked their 95-year-old mums, what would they say? Would they say you’re much better off making sure you’re doing it well, rather than living longer?”

Sinclair believes the investment in Altos is useful, but suggests policymakers will have to tackle the increased inequalities that might result from the science. “The people who will have access to it first are the people who are already living longer and are going to be wealthier,” he says. At the same time, “once you have new medications that work, it’s very difficult for governments not to offer them.”

Is it safe to say these companies have an image problem? Scepticism comes naturally in the field, ever since Herodotus lied (or, if you’re being charitable, was duped by a myth) about people bathing in a fountain of youth in the fifth century BC. It also strikes me as noteworthy that so many cultural depictions of eternal life and the quest for immortality, from Gilgamesh to Indiana Jones to Dr Manhattan, are cautionary tales.

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Professor Tom Kirkwood, head of the department of gerontology at Newcastle University, tells me that research on ageing “is at quite an exciting stage” but sometimes the enthusiasm for innovative treatments “doesn’t pay sufficient regard to what we know already about the complexities of the ageing process”. It’s a great deal easier to alter the life history of short-lived animals such as fruit flies and mice than to alter the lifespan of humans, after all. As for Altos, Kirkwood believes it has the potential to be “slightly disruptive”, but, he says, “it would not surprise me if it should turn out that for all the investment that’s made, the breakthroughs prove to be elusive”. Yet he points out that researchers will continue to make bold claims in order to have their work recognised by the capricious attention of the media.

The wacky Bay Area sheen doesn’t help either. It brings to mind “transhumanists” such as Zoltan Istvan, who ran for US president in 2016 promising to conquer death, and philosopher Ingemar Patrick Linden, who calls the suggestion that everyone should die at a natural age “appalling”. Super-rich investors may not use this precise language, but there is undoubtedly a grain of transhumanism in their thinking. As he stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, Bezos urged shareholders to stay nimble, quoting Richard Dawkins: “Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at… If living things don’t actively work to prevent it, they would eventually merge with their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

Altos’s scientists are all in, obviously. “This is what the world needs,” Raj says. Bezos and the rest have created lavish sanctuaries for these talents to thrive. And many would see nothing wrong with that. There are far worse ways to be a billionaire: look at Philip Green.

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Yet the furtiveness with which he conducts his involvement (his investment firm, Bezos Expeditions, has still not commented on the Altos reports) speaks volumes about his self-interest. There are plenty of simpler ways Bezos could improve the lives of others. Let’s be clear: he really does want to be immortal. And I’m not sure there’s anything noble about that.

Surprisingly, one of Bezos’s fellow tech titans articulated a very different philosophy of ageing. In his 2005 commencement address to Stanford graduates, Steve Jobs reflected on his pancreatic cancer diagnosis and offered a powerful rebuke to Silicon Valley-style transhumanism. “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there,” he said. “And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.”

But that is as it should be, he said, because “death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”