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Comment by athrowaway3z | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting Elisson is 2 years older than Trump.

What's he going to do with all that money, and what does he care for the risk it's bad or shady?

Worst case, he got to be #1 for a bit for a few dozen billion, best case he's hoping AGI will extend his life before he croaks.

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I miss the era when people like Dale Carnegie would sponsor some public buildings, instead of ruining the internet and the natural environment.

You may be thinking of Andrew Carnegie. Who was a steel industry tycoon, probably the #2 most polluting industry today. Back then - probably #1.

The Sacklers donated a lot of money to cultural institutions while they poisoned society with opiates.

Doubt he believes that. Getting AGI (whatever that actually means) means we are still far away from reversing ageing.

Even smart people belive a lot of untrue things, and his domain of knowledge isn't likely to include much more biology than my GCSE grade C and a handfull of brilliant.org micro-lessons; it's quite possible, though I would not put specific odds on it, that he's seen e.g. the sudden change in the rate of progress in protein folding, where before it was ~ one PhD thesis per protein and then suddenly AlphaFold did all of them, and extrapolated from that to everything else like an over-enthusiastic PopSci reporter.

We're actually in a great place to reverse aging already with off the shelf stuff you can get from the grey market. We have countless interventions that show improvements in aging-related metrics in humans that show verified longevity benefits in animal models. That's about as good as you can hope for without waiting a lifetime to actually confirm the human actuarial benefit, which is inherently a losing strategy.

(Interestingly, some of the world's dictators do seem to have an interest in the current state of the art in prolonging life. For example Xi and Putin chatted about organ replacement https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr70rvrd41ko)

Yea, but if you goal is extending life then investing in science is probably a better bet than GPU:s

Ah yes, my favourite philosophical dilemma, The Organs of Theseus, and whether or not a sufficiently organ-replaced person is absolved of their previous actions by virtue of not necessarily being the same person.

As a more serious point related to this though, I was under the impression that organ replacement didn't address issues with telomere length?

> What's he going to do with all that money, and what does he care for the risk it's bad or shady?

The thing that unites Ellison, Trump, Musk, Thiel and a fair few of the other politically active billionaires is the obsession with "legacy" - they want to leave their mark in the history books, figures which will likely be remembered and taught in schools in thousands of years similar to Roman emperors.

Musk is the most obvious with his obsession of settling (and eventually dying) on Mars, Trump is dreaming of getting a Nobel Peace Prize (if only to not let Obama be the only US President who got one), and the rest is hunting for the "invented AGI" crown.

Obama was the fourth U.S. president to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, after Theodore Roosevelt (1906) and Woodrow Wilson (1919)—both of whom received the award during their terms—and Jimmy Carter (2002), who received the award 21 years after leaving office. - wikipedia

Thanks for the correction!

Thiel wants his legacy to be bringing about the Antichrist…

Give it all to the IDF.

What does Ellisons personal wealth have to do with this? The concern is that the circular pattern of shifting money between these companies is artificially inflating the stock market to heights that will crash very very badly when this bubble finally pops.

The market is due a correction irrespective of bubble mania.

The implied equity risky premium is getting pretty low - a sign of greed.

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