The controversy raised salient questions about the role of footloose billionaires in British politics. Must they meet some benchmark of commitment to the country before we consider their views? Or is their willingness to leave further evidence that we are not paying enough attention to the needs of business?

Over the past year, Britain has witnessed a succession of wealthy businessmen fuming at the mismanagement of the country and dabbling in politics, often from a position of opulent exile. The chemicals magnate Jim Ratcliffe, another prominent Brexit supporter who moved his tax residency to Monaco in 2020, has not been shy about criticizing his home country. Last month, Ratcliffe declared that Britain was “on the slide”. At one time, he recalled, “we had the greatest empire in the world, we were a great people. We won two world wars.” Today, by contrast, Britain suffers from high taxes, a “green eye towards wealth”, and a failure to control immigration and welfare spending. Above all, Ratcliffe has complained about “ridiculously high” energy prices, which have recently led his company, INEOS, to mothball three chemicals plants in Hull. 

These comments provoked a response from the wealth manager Peter Hargreaves, also a Brexit-backer, who started his company from a bedroom in the Eighties. Hargreaves quipped that Britain “isn’t on a slide, it’s slid… This country is never, ever coming back, it’s finished.”

Meanwhile, it was recently reported that David Reuben, the real estate tycoon who, together with his brother Simon, possesses Britain’s second largest family fortune, relocated to Monaco over the summer. The brothers tend not to comment on politics, but they donated £100,000 to Reform UK this year, having previously given just shy of £1 million to the Tories. This story has since been called into doubt, with evidence that David has already been resident in Monaco for over a decade, but there has been no shortage of super-rich individuals leaving Britain in recent years. Analysis of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index suggests that more than half of the country’s billionaire wealth has moved away since Labour took power in 2024. Hedge fund manager Christopher Rokos, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal and shipping tycoon John Fredriksen have all left recently.  

It is naturally somewhat embarrassing for the government that successful businessmen are leaving the country like rats fleeing a sinking ship, in some instances taking hundreds of millions of pounds of annual tax revenues with them. Yes, Britain’s prosperity and public finances depend far more on raising economic productivity than on wealthy individuals, but insofar as a dim view of Britain’s prospects makes such individuals less likely to invest here, the two are not unrelated. Yet the problem of unhappy capitalists is surely priced-in by a Left-wing government, which can to some extent turn it to their own advantage. Look at these self-interested billionaires, they can say (making sure to utter the word billionaire with a sneer), they would rather abandon us than pay their share. 

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By the same token, since many of these truculent expats are either Brexit supporters or Reform and Conservative donors, their interventions pose a problem for the Right. For parties promising to put British people first, it is awkward to be receiving financial and rhetorical support from ultra-wealthy individuals whose commitment to the country often does not extend to actually living here. This reinforces what Janan Ganesh has called a “patriotism problem” on the Right: figures like Nigel Farage claim to love Britain, but have almost nothing positive to say about the country as it actually exists. Then again, that stance is what endears Reform to the section of the electorate that thinks the country is fundamentally broken. For those voters, the fact that billionaires share the same analysis may matter more than their tax residency does. Their decision to leave the country is, after all, a powerful confirmation of the narrative.

A greater contradiction lies in Reform’s attitude to the wealthy in general. Farage, whose career began as a commodities trader in the midst of the Thatcher revolution, speaks proudly about his ability to earn money, and to attract it. His party has received tens of millions of pounds — the largest political donations in British history — from another pair of expat billionaires, the cryptocurrency magnates Ben Delo (until recently a Hong Kong resident) and Christopher Harborne (who has acquired Thai citizenship). Both have now returned to Britain after Labour attempted to block their contributions. Over the summer, Farage defended his monied backers as “men who’ve gone off around the world as entrepreneurs and succeeded — the sort of people we used to admire over centuries”. Yet his party appeals to struggling blue-collar workers and lower middle-class sole traders and small business owners, many of whom feel the deck has been stacked against them and in favor of the rich. Last week, Robert Jenrick criticized the Conservatives’ proposed inheritance tax reforms as “offering handouts to multi-millionaires”.

Wealth, however, may not be as important as we might assume. Dyson is an intriguing figure in this context because he has long argued that Britain’s problems are tied to the character of its elites, who esteem knowledge work and cultural literacy above the hands-on business of technology, invention, entrepreneurship and trade. In 2004, he even stormed out of his post as chairman of London’s Design Museum, complaining that it had become a “style showcase” chasing visitor numbers with frivolous exhibitions about flower-arranging and designer shoes, rather than a place to promote serious engineering.

In many Western countries, there is now a prominent dividing line between, broadly, managerial cultures and entrepreneurial ones. The former are those employees in institutional settings — corporations, the public sector, NGOs, and what Dyson calls an “Oxford-Westminster bubble” — who value credentials, are fond of rules, and assume that the world is shaped by ideas and narratives. By contrast, those of an entrepreneurial persuasion are interested in the material facts of how things actually work, while chafing against rules and prizing innovation and individual ambition. 

Consider the coalition that voted for Donald Trump in 2024. It included people who work in traditional industries involving cars, machinery or oil and gas, as well as those who do business outside of corporate structures, such as family-owned enterprises and venture capitalists. These groups were united in their resentment of a professional managerial class, stereotypically inhabiting a world of yoga studios and DEI policies, which stifled them with regulations and liberal mores. 

The revolt of Britain’s entrepreneurs indicates that a similar tension has emerged here. Terms of opprobrium such as “lanyard class” and “the Blob” try to capture a middle-class, managerial ethos that now runs through the country’s institutions like a stick of rock. Its priority is not how the economic and material underpinnings of modern life operate, but ensuring that they conform to the appropriate standards mandated by equalities law, environmental regulations and progressive cultural etiquette. There is an utter disconnect between this worldview and, for instance, the cowboy capitalism of post-Soviet Russia where the Reuben brothers originally made their fortune trading aluminum, or INEOS factories producing nasty chemicals and spewing out carbon emissions, or disruptive and potentially dodgy technologies such as cryptocurrency.  

The important thing to note about this conflict is that, while it is primarily expressed as a fissure within Britain’s elites, it is fundamentally a question of attitudes and social environment, and can therefore provide the basis of a much wider division. Less privileged staff at managerial institutions are likely to absorb the dominant assumptions of those settings, while people of widely differing means and backgrounds can identify with a message of self-reliance, ambition and scorn for meddling bureaucrats. Seen in these terms, there is a political logic in Reform courting crypto-billionaires, fossil fuel-reliant industries and broader swathes of voters who sympathize with an anti-establishment sentiment. Likewise, there is a logic in parties of the Left treating these things as threats to be resisted. 

The fundamental problem for the Right is that, 10 years on from Brexit, it is no closer to a viable program for the dynamic, free-trading Britain envisioned by its entrepreneurial supporters. That would mean lowering taxes on business and wealth — paid for by welfare cuts — and deregulating everything from planning laws to wages and the financial sector. It would mean, moreover, explaining to the public that they must struggle for survival in a highly competitive global economy, something which only Liz Truss has attempted in recent years, and she only succeeded in making the idea less palatable. British politics has become increasingly insular in recent years, focused on domestic stability and reluctant to compromise with a wider world that appears to be largely a source of insecurity and danger. This suits the Right when it comes to territorial and legal sovereignty, with both the Tories and Reform converging on a platform of tighter borders, withdrawing from international treaties and curbing multiculturalism at home. Yet neither party has found a way to reconcile its business-friendly instincts with a public that still desires a protective state. 

Kemi Badenoch’s new Conservative manifesto, The Right Way, is at least somewhat forthright in its diagnosis, emphasizing the need for Britain to be “competitive” in the conditions it offers to businesses. Yet details are notably scarce when it comes to the goal of reducing strategic dependency on China, a rather large and complex caveat to the statement that “free trade should be the presumption”. More importantly, this return to the Conservatives’ free-market, small-state default, greeted with a profound sigh of relief from what remains of the party faithful, is essentially a concession of electoral defeat. It marks the end of Tory efforts to compete against Labour and Reform in working-class, post-industrial regions.

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But nor has Reform reckoned with the degree of state subsidy that rebuilding British industry in these areas will actually require, or how this can be squared with Farage’s belief that, vis-à-vis Brexit, “we have not taken advantage of the opportunities to deregulate and become more competitive”. The answer, we are told time and again, is that scrapping Net Zero taxes and cutting wasteful government spending will boost industry and the exchequer alike, yet this simple solution belies the complexity of the problem. Even if an anti-establishment coalition spanning billionaires and tradesmen can work electorally, it will soon come under pressure from the conflicting interests and power disparities within it. The prodigious sums donated by Delo and Harborne suggest that a Reform government would likely follow a similar course to the second Trump presidency, beginning with ineffectual support for blue-collar workers before swerving into the warm embrace of global tech capital. 

Strangely, it is Andy Burnham’s Labour Party that looks best placed to capitalize on Britain’s siege mentality. The party’s identification with multiculturalism, and its instinctive support for immigration, has left the residual impression that it is an outward-looking political force. In fact, Labour now trumpets its pride in a diverse Britain while viewing the wider world with a mixture of suspicion and apathy. Burnham is the most domestically-focused prime minister in recent memory. Though his desire to invest in the country’s economic foundations is welcome, his big-state program offers no meaningful role for business or entrepreneurship. Labour has many antagonists — Donald Trump, American tech oligarchs, Russia, Israel — but few real friends. Rejoining the EU is increasingly the limit of its global imagination, and insofar as that vision does not account for the bloc’s own serious economic and political difficulties, it is an imagined one. 

The irony is that Burnham’s comforting insularity is only possible thanks to the degree to which globalization is already part of the grain of British society. This is a country that can afford an expensive commitment to national decarbonization, driving away industrialists like Ratcliffe, because it has resigned itself to dependency on China’s coal-powered factories. It can fund its social expenditures because the markets, even if they charge an ever-greater premium, continue to buy its debt. And it can produce a leader like Burnham because, as the recent scandal at Manchester City FC has reminded us, his municipal fiefdom was regenerated with oil and gas money from Abu Dhabi. 

Clearly, this strange settlement cannot go on forever. The chancellor is preparing for a budget in two weeks where neither borrowing nor taxes can sustainably go much higher, while the need to control runaway welfare spending and ease pressure on businesses is becoming pressing even from a soft-Left perspective. It has been easy to ignore billionaires lamenting Britain’s lack of competitive drive when relying on others has been so easy. That may not be much longer. 

This last is no over-statement. In 2025, companies and private investors will spend more than $600 billion developing ever-more-powerful AI. This enormous boom (or bubble) has made people like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison even more fabulously rich. But advanced artificial intelligence is, notoriously, a black box. No computer scientist understands how it really works, and while everyone agrees it will profoundly change our lives, no one can say exactly how. One prominent economist predicts that AI will somehow introduce an era of unprecedented “human flourishing”. Others, including the computer scientists who developed the AI 2027 scenario, warn that it may “kill all the people”. Setting aside that extreme outcome, there are obvious reasons for concern. The internet, social media, and chatbots have already allowed us to peek under the hood of advanced, highly monetized digital technology, and what’s flown out so far is not encouraging: depression, psychosis, cognitive impairment, societal atomization, political polarization, enhanced surveillance and censorship — the list goes on. And because more than half the people in the world already own smartphones and spend, on average, more than three hours a day on them, these effects are global.

Yet while superintelligent AI is already looking like Pandora’s box, governments, corporations, and consumers are hell-bent on opening it. The march of technology is unstoppable, and tech oligarchs now have as much say over our collective human fate as any world leader. What’s more, they know it. Some, such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, have even come to regard themselves as potential saviors of humanity.

We’ve grown used to enormously wealthy tech entrepreneurs acting like they are in the business of solving global problems. Peter Thiel recently recalled a conversation in which Musk and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, disagreed about whether making us an interplanetary species or building superhuman AI was “the most important project in the world”. You might have thought that the most important project in the world would address some substantial threat to people’s safety and well-being, like the precipitous collapse of education at all levels, or the serious risk of civil war in Western nations. But superhuman AI and the quest to colonize space are expressions of a techno-politics that aims not to mend the world, but simply to leave it behind.

The desire to build machines that will allow us to flee our terrestrial home, and that will make humanity functionally obsolete, reflects the fatality of technology — a seductive, yet ultimately monstrous synthesis of desire and ingenuity. René Descartes spelled out the project in his 1637 Discourse on Method. This masterpiece of political rhetoric was written not in scholarly Latin but demotic French, to reach the broadest readership. He claimed that basically everything he learned in the finest school in France, where he was at the top of the class, was worthless. Knowledge needed an entirely new foundation, to be provided by modern tools of mathematical analysis, including the algebraic geometry he pioneered. His as yet unnamed project, he wrote, promised to make human beings the “masters and possessors of nature”. Descartes predicted a future in which technology would produce “an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth and all the goods one finds in it”, rid us of “an infinity of maladies”, and perhaps make us immortal. He compared himself to a prophet of God, who would not sin against mankind by withholding earthly salvation — a magnanimous example, perhaps, for today’s tech oligarchs. Scientists, he suggested, would be the new rulers; science, the new state religion.

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Human beings have always made tools to accomplish their goals, altering their relationship with nature and one another in the process. But for most of human history, that activity was subordinate to larger conceptions of the good, embodied in cultural practices and political structures. Our pre-modern forebears regarded the natural or created world as intrinsically well ordered, a suitable basis for human fulfillment. They found goodness and beauty in everyday life, and celebrated them in religious ritual, architecture, art, music, and literature. Technology, however, is indifferent to such soulful gratitude. It considers the world to be, at best, neutral matter, capable of any number of transformations and uses, waiting only to serve our desires for security, convenience, and pleasure.

In the long run, technology — which promised to give people what they want, when they want it — was the easiest of sales. It didn’t just supercharge technical advancement. It made the potentially boundless or infinite development of what the Greeks called technē, technical skill, an end in itself, eclipsing all prior conceptions of the human good. Actuality — the real character of human existence, felt and understood — paled in comparison with possibility; the imagined future, a virtual playground of unconstrained individual freedom, came to seem more desirable than the quotidian present. Digital technology in particular has insinuated itself throughout our daily lives, dissolving human connections at alarming speed and exacerbating a crisis of meaning. Yet it has also proved to be a powerful economic engine and an invaluable military resource, so much so that it would be unthinkable to step off the accelerating AI train.

Today, technology is entering its final, post-human phase, in which it no longer regards nature, our bodies, and our psyches as neutral material to be molded according to our wishes, but rather confronts them as enemies. This development, while shocking, was not entirely unforeseen. Its main lines were spelled out almost a century ago, in 1929, in a hideous little book by the gifted Irish scientist J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. Bernal’s “rational soul” is the spirit of technology, which is moving with “ever increasing acceleration”. Its enemies are the primary forces opposing “the progress of the future”: the world (nature), the flesh (the human body), and the devil (human psychology).

For Bernal, the world is a poor prison from which outer space is the only escape. In the future, synthetic foods and clothing will make for “a world incomparably more efficient and richer than the present”. Later, manmade “globes” — space shells 10 miles in diameter — will replace the pathetic one we’ve been stuck on for so long. Like the Russian Revolution (Bernal was a Stalinist), itself a violent leap into an inscrutable future, this radical break with the past promises somehow to make ordinary politics unnecessary: in these artificial globes, “there would probably be no more need for government than in a modern hotel”. But our descendants will aspire to govern the universe, putting an end to its spectacular wastefulness: “the stars cannot be allowed to continue in their old way but will be turned into efficient heat engines.”

In Bernal’s estimation, the flesh — the human body — is by no means our friend. Much of it already serves little purpose: “modern mechanical and modern chemical discoveries have rendered both the skeletal and metabolic functions of the body to a large extent useless.” What the flesh needs now is “radical alteration” through physiological chemistry and the extension of foreign bodies into the structure of its living matter. “Normal man”, Bernal insists, “is an evolutionary dead end”, and there is much work to be done: “We badly need a small sense organ for detecting wireless frequencies, eyes for infra-red, ultra-violet and X-rays, ears for supersonics, detectors of high and low temperatures, of electrical potential and current, and chemical organs of many kinds.”

Bernal envisions “the direction of mechanism by pure volition” (something Elon Musk’s Neuralink, now rivaled by other groups, has already achieved through brain implants for people with spinal cord injuries). And while his transhuman cyborg — which, he predicts, will ultimately evolve into a brain in a vat — is apt to strike us as “a strange, monstrous and inhuman creature… he is the only logical outcome of the type of humanity that exists at present”.

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The greatest impediment to the birth of the technological and ideological “new man”, Bernal writes, is our species’ persistent irrationality, especially including its “unintelligent respect for the past”. This is where his book becomes truly demonic, inverting the spiritual order on which civilization was founded. For “we can abandon the world and subdue the flesh only if we first expel the devil” — the retrograde sensibility that rejects “the progress of dehumanization”. That can happen only if “the scientific expert” — linked, Borg-like, to other advanced consciousnesses — rules the world. Bernal imagines political and psychological manipulators on the model of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, a scientific aristocracy with “the means of directing the masses in harmless occupations and of maintaining a perfect docility under the appearance of perfect freedom”. These masses, reduced in numbers until the elite “are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them”, might be allowed to live on Earth as “a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment”.

Bernal’s chilling priorities to one side, he understood earlier than anyone else that technology, like Soviet communism, would ultimately demand a radical disconnection from the past and a leap away from the only world we’ve ever known. Such desperate leaps are, at bottom, a symptom of, and response to, nihilism: the sense that life as we know it is basically meaningless. And in a kind of doom loop, technology now offers itself as the solution to the problem of nihilism it has helped to create. This helps to explain the willingness of tech leaders to take extraordinary risks with our collective future.

Musk’s idea of space colonization was a political project, which he gave up on when he realized that “woke AI” would follow us to Mars. His desire to make a clean break with the ideological overload of contemporary life was so strong that he was prepared to abandon the Earth. How many people would have been willing to join him? The answer would give us some idea about the insufficiency of meaning that Bernal so completely expresses in his dystopian vision.

According to Forbes’s 2023 list, 2,640 people on earth are billionaires. This number has near doubled in the past decade. The top individuals are familiar faces — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk — but the vast majority of billionaires are unknowns. Tetra Pak-heir Finn Rausing ($8.6 billion) is a niche figure by any measure. But still these billionaires wield extraordinary influence over the world’s economy, politics, and technology: from the Koch brothers’ heavy lobbying against climate action to the elevation of Right-wing speech on X after Musk’s acquisition. Adrienne LaFrance recently argued in The Atlantic that tech company CEOs use their clout to push policies under an ideology she labels “authoritarian technocracy”.

A billion dollars surely buys influence and fame, but does it make all billionaires cool? In other words, can billionaires directly shape the culture by inspiring mass imitation of their particular lifestyle choices? The classic theories of 19th-century sociologists Gabriel Tarde and Georg Simmel posit that culture “trickles down” from the top of society to the classes below. Yet this is not our reality today. Judging by the aesthetics spread by luxury fashion brands, Hollywood films and advertising, the “creative classes” — with celebrities as their elite segment — still seem to wield the most power in shaping mainstream tastes.

Why aren’t billionaires cool, then? “Trickle-down” theories of society require a well-established aristocratic or upper class of people who inhabit a rarefied world, but this doesn’t describe the current billionaire class very well. Instead, the term “billionaire” is best understood as the highest marker of success inside separate worlds of business, technology and entertainment, and each billionaire tends to socialise with like-minded people in their own milieu. There are only occasional crossovers. The Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference may be called a “summer camp for billionaires” but mere millionaires also attend.

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In the past, the upper class more or less meant Old Money, and these families conspired to block the social elevation of New Money. Today, the billionaire class is a mix of “self-made” individuals and those born into oligarchic families. This discrepancy in backgrounds leads to varied tastes and dispositions. Unlike Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page, who grew up middle class, the heirs of super-rich parents only know a life of mansions, preparatory schools and private jets. Political views also diverge wildly: Peter Thiel on the libertarian Right, George Soros on the liberal Left.

These inconsistencies blur the public’s understanding of billionaires as a unified class that can guide tastes. This is compounded by the fact that so many billionaires are, in recent parlance, “swagless”. Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates will never live down the video of their lumbering on-stage dancing during the Windows 95 launch. A few billionaires, including Jay-Z and Oprah, built their business empires on the love and respect of mass audiences long before their rise to the Forbes list. But the process doesn’t work in reverse: uncool people who become billionaires remain mostly uncool.

Another important factor is that the billion-dollar range of wealth may be so extreme as to cripple previous ways the rich achieved social influence. In his 1899 work The Theory of the Leisure Class, economist Thorstein Veblen published the canonical model of how wealth influences cultural values. Since raw wealth alone can’t bring esteem, the rich must convert their assets into three types of inimitable display: conspicuous waste, conspicuous leisure, and conspicuous consumption. These actions lead to certain preferences — for silver tableware or fancy cars — that set the standards for the rest of society.

But in our hypermodern world, Veblen’s techniques no longer work very well. Conspicuous leisure is taboo in a hyper-capitalist world where money never sleeps; the rich are often now busier than the poor. And market-inspired values have made us too rational to be impressed by conspicuous waste. Musk looks foolish for paying $44 billion to purchase Twitter and instituting a series of changes that caused a 71% drop in value.

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Most notably, conspicuous consumption doesn’t help billionaires stand out with personal lifestyle choices such as accessories, vehicles, and vacations. There are no watches or handbags 1,000-times more expensive than what basic millionaires already pay. The priciest car today costs $30 million, not $300 million. As it stands, it’s almost impossible for billionaires to achieve Veblen-like distinction through buying consumer goods. Even with fortress-like mansions, giant yachts, great artworks, and private jets they can’t begin to display the full extent of their wealth. And so their visible choices aren’t more distinct than other influential millionaires.

And where we do glimpse into billionaire taste, much of it tends to be underwhelming. They often appear in gossip magazines looking just like us. Bezos arrives at fancy parties dressed like a mid-tier invite. Zuckerberg wears a uniform of generic grey T-shirts — and posts videos of his training in mixed martial arts. Musk spends his time trolling liberals on X.

But perhaps billionaires are wisely limiting their own public expenditure in order to divert attention from their vast fortunes. Populist economics have taken over both political parties in the US, and there is a growing call for a new economic paradigm to curb extreme income inequality. In her new book, Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, philosopher Ingrid Robeyns argues that the mere existence of billionaires creates severe distortions in democratic society. One example is that the prodigious success of Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Spiegel convinced many Millennials that if they engaged in never-ending hustle, they too could achieve such riches. Even the most pro-capitalist youth, however, would likely draw a line between the right to enjoy one’s billions earned in entrepreneurial success and dollars inherited from a purple birth. The best way to keep money in the family is to disappear from public view.

This all suggests that there is a long-term incentive for Right-wing billionaires to stay uncool. Their stiffness and geekiness obscures their broader social influence and helps build alliances with other groups who also feel excluded from urban professional class tastes. Precisely because they are not cultural elites, billionaires can win over lower-income groups, who, rationally, would benefit from the redistribution of their wealth. And they can cast themselves as saviours in the Right-wing war against urban and educated “elites”. Former President Donald Trump’s crassness — a preference for steaks well done, ornate apartment design, and Stormy Daniels — embodies what his less wealthy supporters understand as his inherent opposition to their enemies in the professional classes. Business Insider’s Savannah Bradley recently made a similar point about billionaire singer Taylor Swift: she dresses in outmoded ways to better connect with her outmoded audience.

As billionaires are small in number, they need to assemble broader coalitions of anti-liberals in order to stop populist movements from passing more progressive economic policies and regulations of their businesses. In this, their failure to be stylish is an immense help. Every time we mock billionaires’ dance moves and try-hard leather jackets, we may be further obfuscating their vast influence in American life.

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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Peter Thiel on the dangers of progress

By Mary Harrington

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.”

I’ve been thinking about this lately because everyone is talking about billionaires. For instance, there was a very stupid row recently after Bill Gates was quoted as saying that he would be left “counting what he had left over” under tax proposals by Elizabeth Warren, one of the frontrunners in the race for the Democratic party’s nomination for president.

The reason I say it was stupid is because literally the next words that Gates said were “I’m just kidding,” and that he had a moment before said that he had already paid about $10 billion in tax and was happy to pay twice that. Gates — who has also given away about $45 billion to his charitable foundation, to pay for among other things malaria treatment — is a weird example to pick as a representative of the class of “greedy billionaires who want to hide all their money away from the taxman”, but people did it anyway.

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By ISABEL SAWHILL AND CHRISTOPHER PULLIAM

But there have been less stupid conversations about billionaires too, coming from the Labour Party. It started with Labour’s Lloyd Russell-Moyle saying on BBC Radio 5 Live that no one should be a billionaire. Then Jeremy Corbyn had this to say, when he launched the Labour election campaign: “There are 150 billionaires in the UK while 14 million people live in poverty. In a fair society there would be no billionaires and no one would live in poverty.” Then, this morning, the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, was on the Today programme talking about it too. McDonnell is a bit cannier than those two, so he didn’t outright call for the end of billionaires, but he agreed that the inequality was “grotesque”.

First: are Corbyn’s numbers right? I can answer that quickly: yes, close enough. If you go down The Sunday Times Rich List, you get to number 152 before you reach someone whose wealth is listed as less than £1 billion. Perhaps there are technical reasons why that’s not the right way to look at it, but most of us would be happy to say that Corbyn is right. And the Department for Work and Pensions says that 22% of the population lives below the line of “relative poverty”, that is, in households that earn less than 60% of the median household income, after housing costs; that’s about 14.8 million people. Again you could quibble with the definition, but it would be quibbling.

So the question is: would getting rid of billionaires improve things? Would the fairer society (let’s just shortcut the “what is fairness” debate for now) that Corbyn envisages be brought closer by removing all the billionaires from Britain?

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One point I’d like to make. I think it is likely that the money that Bill Gates has paid in taxes has done far less good than the money he has given away, by most people’s definition of “good”. Let’s imagine that all of the $10 billion he says he’s paid in tax has gone to the US federal government. Here’s a breakdown of the US budget, which tells us that of that $10 billion, about £800 million will go on servicing the national debt, and about $1.5 billion on defence. About $2.5 billion will go on social security, and about the same on Medicare and Medicaid. All the rest will go on assorted infrastructure spending and national payroll and so on.

If he’d given it to his own foundation, according to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s 2018 annual report, about $3.6 billion would have gone to “global development”; about $2.7 billion to “global health”; and about $1.3 billion on “global growth and opportunity”. Breaking it down further, a quarter of the “global development” fund would have gone on delivering vaccines, a bit more than a quarter to combating polio, 16% on family planning. Of the “global health” fund, about 30% has gone on malaria and HIV prevention and treatment.

If you want to improve the world, at least if you take “improving the world” to mean roughly the same things I do, you would much rather that Bill Gates’s money was spent fighting malaria than servicing the US national debt or paying for F-35 Lightnings. I’d even rather it was spent fighting malaria than going to Medicare or social services. The charity evaluator GiveWell estimates that by providing cheap antimalarial bednets, you can save one child’s life for about $2,800. It costs about four times that to provide one month of treatment for the average cancer patient in the US.

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And most of the money going in taxes will not be doing that; it will be building roads in Topeka or paying civil servants’ wages. These are important things, but if you want to maximise the number of lives you save, the money is much better spent on the Gates Foundation or other well-run charities working in the developing world than it is on the US government. There’s a much more rigorous examination of this idea here.

But this is not an overall argument in favour of not taxing billionaires. Not all billionaires are Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett and William Hewlett have also donated billions to good causes, but not all do, and some give it to, for example, Harvard University, where it will fund the education of mainly already rich people. Let’s imagine that the amount given to charitable foundations is utterly overwhelmed by the amount that could be taken off them in taxes, so even accounting for the gigantic mismatch in how much good a dollar will do if you give it to the Gates Foundation rather than the US federal government, it’s still better if you take all the money off the billionaires and give it to the taxman.

The next question is: do we think that will lead to fewer poor people? I assume that’s the goal, rather than making billionaires poorer being a goal in its own right. If so, then I should come straight out and say I am deeply sceptical.

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By Sam Leith

Here’s my reasoning. Billionaires are one product of the loosely defined economic system that we call “capitalism” and which has largely taken over the world since the collapse of feudalism. Luckily, they’re not the only product of that system.

In that time, worldwide, there has also been a spectacular drop in child mortality; a spectacular drop in world hunger; a spectacular growth in the number of democracies; a spectacular growth in life expectancy, especially in the developing world; a spectacular growth in levels of education, especially female education; and many other good things I can preface with the words “a spectacular”. (Just go here and look at “research by topic” to see a load of graphs that can be summarised as “good things over time: up; bad things over time: down”.)

That economic system is, of course, flawed and, like the US federal budget, allocates loads of money in ways that are not optimised for global improvement. A hypothetical god-like superintelligent AI could probably run the economy much better. But the hugely imperfect system we have has steadily improved things, nonetheless.

That’s not to say we couldn’t make improvements to it. But remember the deer? You can make improvements to complex but essentially functional systems by changing them slightly, not by making their legs two feet longer.

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By Peter Franklin

By analogy, the economic system sort of works. It is making people better off and healthier and longer-lived (and, it seems, happier). We could improve it; make its legs a little longer. Making billionaires pay significantly more tax (Gates said he was happy to pay double, remember) seems a making-legs-half-an-inch-longer sort of idea. It might make a few of them move to Grand Cayman, but it should increase tax revenues, and not increase the unemployment rate or damage the economy too badly. If it doesn’t work out like that, at least you haven’t irretrievably screwed a global economy that is slowly lifting people out of poverty, and you can change it back. As McDonnell said on Today, there’s plenty of room for a flatter, more equal society, without getting rid of billionaires entirely.

But “making it impossible for there to be billionaires any more” seems more like a making-legs-two-feet-longer sort of idea. The economic system creates very rich people, often but not always as a reward for creating or selling things that people want, such as Harry Potter or Microsoft Windows or petroleum. I don’t know exactly how you’d change the system to stop it doing that (and Corbyn hasn’t, I think, been specific), but it’d have to be something pretty radical and profound. And then you really do run the risk of doing terrible damage to the workings of the economy. Maybe Corbyn, Russell-Moyle and McDonnell are sufficiently farsighted and brilliant to be able to do it without screwing it all up, but I am unconvinced.

Billionaires is one of those words that sets off culture wars. It has more meaning than simply “someone whose net worth is equal to or greater than one thousand million local currency units”; it’s capitalist oppressor or captain of industry, our team, their team. But billionaires, for better or for worse, are the product of an economic system that is, slowly, jerkily, unevenly, making the world better. If we want to get rid of them altogether, rather than nibble away at the edges, we need to be damn sure we’re not tearing down Chesterton’s fence.