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Jeff Bezos pops champagne after emerging from the New Shepard capsule after his spaceflight on July 20, 2021.
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All things must die, according to the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, but that could be about to change.

A growing number of tech billionaires have decided they want to use their enormous wealth to try to help humans “cheat death.”

Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos, Alphabet‘s Larry Page, Oracle‘s Larry Ellison and Palantir’s Peter Thiel are just a few of the super-rich who have taken a keen interest in the fast-emerging field of longevity, according to interviews, books and media reports.

While breakthroughs are far from guaranteed, they hope that various medicines, therapies and other life science technologies will enable humans to live well beyond 100 years old and possibly to 200, 300, or even longer.

But are their efforts going to benefit humanity as a whole or just an elite few? It’s a tricky question that divides opinion.

The filter down effect

“Technologies that initially are only affordable to the rich typically become more widely available with time,” Stefan Schubert, a researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science who specializes in “effective altruism,” told CNBC. Indeed, this is true of everything from air travel to smartphones and medicine.

Tech investor Jaan Tallinn, the co-founder of Skype, told CNBC that Silicon Valley’s quest to live forever will eventually benefit humanity as a whole.

“I think involuntary death is clearly morally bad, which makes the quest for longevity a morally noble thing to engage in,” Tallinn said. “Early adopters always tend to pay more and take larger risks than the ‘mass market,’ so if therapies start off on the expensive/risky side, that’s to be expected.”

Tallinn added that he thinks it’s “counterproductive” to require that a new service be available to everyone before anyone is allowed to use it, but he said he understands the instinct.

Sean O hEigeartaigh, co-director of Cambridge University’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk, told CNBC that many advances in longevity science could have broad benefits, adding that they could reduce the occurrence or severity of older age-related diseases including dementia and heart health.

“Extending max lifespan significantly in the near-term seems unlikely to me; but identifying and arresting aging-related factors that increase preponderance and severity of age-related conditions is more plausible,” Ó hÉigeartaigh said.

Some are concerned that the Earth’s finite resources could come under strain if people live longer, healthier lives.

However, by the time meaningful life extension advances are made, Ó hÉigeartaigh expects population numbers to be more stable in more parts of the world.

“I expect meaningful lifespan extension to be a century or more away, and by then I expect a parallel change in societal attitude towards euthanasia,” he said, adding that he thinks euthanasia will be more acceptable and more common in the coming years.

What about climate change?

While some believe that billionaires should be able to spend their money on what they see fit, not everyone thinks tech billionaires should be using their money to fund life extension research.

Jon Crowcroft, a computer science professor at Cambridge University, told CNBC they’d be better off pumping more of their billions into climate change mitigation technologies instead of longevity research.

“It’s a bit pointless living forever on a dying planet,” said Crowcroft.

But Tallinn told CNBC he finds the tech billionaire’s efforts to support longevity research “commendable.”

“I think it’s generally unfair to pit good causes against each other in a world where most resources are wasted on morally unimportant or even reprehensible things,” Tallinn said.

Billionaire’s chasing immortality

Bezos, the second richest man in the world behind Elon Musk, has invested some of his $199 billion into a new “rejuvenation” start-up called Altos Labs, according to a report from MIT Technology Review earlier this month.

The anti-ageing start-up, which is said to be pursuing biological reprogramming technology, is reportedly also backed by Russian-Israeli venture capitalist Yuri Milner, who made a fortune as an early investor in Facebook.

Elsewhere, Oracle founder Ellison has donated more than $370 million to research about aging and age-related diseases, according to The New Yorker.

Meanwhile, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page helped launch Calico, a secretive venture that’s tracking mice from birth to death in the hope of finding markers for diseases like diabetes and Alzheimer’s, according to a report in The New Yorker. Calico is part of Alphabet, the holding company that also owns Google.

One of the biggest advocates for life extension among the tech billionaires is Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and Palantir and backed Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal Inc.
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In 2006, he donated $3.5 million to support anti-ageing research through the non-profit Methuselah Mouse Prize foundation. “Rapid advances in biological science foretell of a treasure trove of discoveries this century, including dramatically improved health and longevity for all,” he said at the time. Thiel had upped his investment in Methuselah Mouse Prize foundation to $7 million by 2017, according to Time.

According to The New Yorker, Thiel and Bezos have both invested in San Francisco-based Unity Biotechnology, a company whose founder reportedly said he wants to “vaporize a third of human diseases in the developed world.”

Life extension stocks?

On the other side of the Atlantic, British billionaire Jim Mellon told CNBC last September that he was planning to take Juvenescence, his own life extension company, public in the next six to 12 months.

It’s yet to happen, but Juvenescence is continuing to invest in a wide range of anti-ageing therapies that it thinks have the potential to extend the human life.

One of those investments is Insilico Medicine, which aims to use artificial intelligence for drug discovery. Juvenescence has also backed AgeX Therapeutics, a California-headquartered firm trying to create stem cells that can regenerate ageing tissue, and LyGenesis, which wants to develop a technology that uses lymph nodes as bioreactors to regrow replacement organs.

Other billionaires, including Mike Cannon-Brookes, the co-founder of Australian software firm Atlassian, and NEX Group founder Michael Spencer, have invested in Juvenescence.

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.

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LONDON — ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that specializes in generating synthetic voices through artificial intelligence, has revealed plans to be IPO-ready within five years.

The company told CNBC it is targeting major global expansion as it prepares for an initial public offering.

“We expect to build more hubs in Europe, Asia and South America, and just keep scaling,” Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ CEO and co-founder, told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.

He identified Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico as potential new locations. London is currently ElevenLabs’ biggest office, followed by New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore.

Staniszewski said the eventual aim is to get the company ready for an IPO in the next five years.

“From a commercial standpoint, we would like to be ready for an IPO in that time,” he said. “If the market is right, we would like to create a public company … that’s going to be here for the next generation.”

Undecided on location

Fundraising plans

ElevenLabs was valued at $3.3 billion following a recent $180 million funding round. The company is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, as well as corporate names like Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.

Staniszewski said his startup was open to raising more money from VCs, but it would depend on whether it sees a valid business need, like scaling further in other markets. “The way we try to raise is very much like, if there’s a bet we want to take, to accelerate that bet [we will] take the money,” he said.

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.

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The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday. 

“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement

The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China. 

The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.

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Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.

S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.

Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.

Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.

While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.

DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.

Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.

New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

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