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The Nightly On … Tomorrow: The most powerful | Australian Markets

March 20, 2025

The Nightly On … Tomorrow: The most powerful | Australian Markets

Nobody actually is aware of what occurs if you die.

But billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has a fairly good concept what is going to occur to him: his blood might be changed with an organ preservation answer, his temperature cooled to round minus 196 levels Celsius and his physique saved in a vacuum-insulated metallic cylinder at subfreezing temperatures, utilizing liquid nitrogen.

At least, that’s the plan.

The PayPal founder, with a $30 billion fortune, is one of a crop of more and more rich and powerful billionaires whose huge fortunes — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos alone are collectively price more than $1 trillion — are getting used to form the longer term of the planet.

Some, like Thiel, are utilizing their billions to fund analysis aimed toward extending the human lifespan — even defeating death. Others are more involved with the lifespan of a quickly warming Earth and are investing in every part from nuclear energy to fart-defying vaccines to battle climate change.

Then there are those that see our future among the many stars.

The pink planet

“One day Mars will save Earth, I am certain of it,” Musk, whose wealth is estimated at $620b, mentioned of the planet on which he hopes to die — ideally not on influence.

His timeframe for getting there has accelerated sooner than a Cybertruck on an empty freeway, since early predictions it may take 100 years to ascertain a self-sustaining civilisation.

CEO of Tesla and Space X Elon Musk. Credit: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Musk now expects to have a million people on Mars within 20 years and SpaceX staff are busy designing a Martian metropolis.

The difficulty is just not how to get there — Musk’s SpaceX has a reusable rocket he hopes might be up to the job — however every part after that. Humans can’t breathe the planet’s air with out a spacesuit, drink its contaminated water — principally subsurface ice — or deal with its minus 30C floor temperatures.

Those issues are usually not insurmountable however Musk’s multibillion-dollar wager they are often solved in his lifetime is an bold one. NASA doesn’t plan to even land a individual on Mars till the 2040s.

Lost in space

In aggressive spirit, Musk and Bezos are the Antonio Salieri and Ludwig van Beethoven of the skies.

In the short time period Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin are competing to see who will get to the Moon first. Both have multibillion-dollar contracts with NASA to just do that.

SpaceX was to have carried out the primary personal flight across the moon for Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who memorably marketed online for a date to grow to be “the first woman to travel to the moon”.

Delays killed Maezawa’s plan — and presumably his love life.

When Bezos, price $380b, appears up on the night time sky he sees a barely totally different future to Musk.

Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander might be used to move astronauts to the lunar floor as early as 2029. Credit: AP

Rather than in search of Earth 2.0, he says he desires to make use of space exploration to improve the home we have already got.

Bezos hopes to seek out sources on different planets that can be utilized to battle Earth’s climate emergency and depletion of its own natural sources.

“There is no Plan B, we have to save Earth,” he mentioned in a 2019 Blue Origin presentation.

That sentiment is just not totally aligned together with his ambition to ascertain human space colonies in low Earth orbit, which he claims may home “trillions”.

Bunker life

While some billionaires imagine the answer to Earth’s challenges lies in outer space, others wish to go underground.

When Zuckerberg’s plans for a 5.5 million sq. metre compound on the Hawaiian island Kauai went public in 2023, the idea was that the Meta chief, price about $400b, was envisaging a future post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Mark Zuckerberg Credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc by way of Getty Imag

Similarly, experiences that Kim Kardashian’s $60 million home included an underground bunker received her followers questioning what the entrepreneurial star, mentioned to be price more than $2b, knew that they didn’t.

But University of Queensland teachers Katherine Guinness, Grant Bollmer and Tom Doig see issues in a different way. They say these billionaires are “seeking to create entirely self-sustaining ecosystems” they will control.

Going nuclear

In Wyoming Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ start-up, Terrapower, is building what’s being billed as “the most advanced nuclear facility in the world”.

Gates is placing a slice of his $170b fortune into nuclear energy at a time when he and his Silicon Valley friends are developing vastly energy-intensive artificial intelligence software program.

Terrapower, whose backers embody legendary investor Warren Buffett, hopes to get the cheaper, smaller and – it says – safer reactors up in about 5 years.

At the identical time Microsoft plans to restart the controversial Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

Gates is only one tech titan respiration new life into the nuclear energy industry. Bezos’ Amazon and Google are additionally shopping for up nuclear reactors.

For some, it’s about decreasing large tech’s carbon footprint and avoiding the worst-case state of affairs for a quickly warming Earth. Others simply need low-cost and dependable vitality.

Smelly cows

That the world’s tech billionaires are more and more enmeshed with political energy was on show at US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the place Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Google chief govt Sundar Pichai occupied prime real estate traditionally reserved for former presidents and household.

But Trump’s climate-change scepticism is just not essentially shared by the billionaires, not less than some of whom are well-versed in adapting their public politics to go well with the political panorama.

Bezos is backing a vaccine to cut back the quantity of methane cows produce. Credit: Julie-Kolibrie/Pixabay (consumer Julie-Kolibrie)

Bezos is one of these investing in decreasing international emissions. And he’s doing it within the most amusing manner doable: by backing a vaccine meant to cut back the quantity of methane produced by cows — each by burping and farting — a vital contributor to international warming.

Bezos’ $15b Bezos Earth Fund is backing a UK project whose scientists imagine the vaccine may cut back the quantity of microbes in cows’ stomachs.

Who desires to stay perpetually?

Then there are the uber rich who’ve one explicit future in thoughts: their own.

US entrepreneur and enterprise capitalist Bryan Johnson is just not a billionaire on paper — his $600m fortune is relatively small change — however his dedication to extending his lifespan has been the main target of headlines as a result of he’s spending tens of millions on every part from injecting his teenage son’s blood to the ominously named penis shockwave remedy.

Other biotech traders are much less personal and more philanthropic. Priscilla Chan, a paediatrician and philanthropist higher often called Zuckerberg’s different half, co-founded a biotech company along with her husband.

One project Chan Zuckerberg Biohub has backed is an attempt to catalogue each cell kind within the human physique to create what has been dubbed “Wikipedia for cells”.

Bezos’ Breakout Ventures backs biotech firms aiming to “dramatically improve human health and the sustainability of our planet”, whereas Thiel has invested in The Methuselah Foundation, a not-for-profit medical charity that goals to make “90 the new 50”.

“Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem,” is how Thiel places it.

And if death can’t be solved, properly, there’s at all times Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company additionally backed by Thiel. It guarantees to freeze people’s heads, our bodies and even their pet canine, within the hope that future medical developments will allow them to be introduced back to life.

Presumably at that time the defrosted billionaire can begin throughout again, carving out the longer term they need for us all.

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