http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/08/ultimately-self-i...
[Of] the world's high net worth individuals, most [do] very little in the way of funding research into aging or the conditions of aging. [Or any other medical technology for that matter]. It is their inaction that is opposed to their own self-interest: they are all aging to death at the same pace as the rest of us, after all. When it comes to access to medical technology the world is remarkably flat: the poor struggle in this as in everything else, but the wealthy have no more ability to buy a way out of aging (or heart disease, or cancer, or any of the other conditions that attend aging) right this instant than does anyone else. What they do have is a far greater ability to create a near future in which rejuvenation biotechnologies exist and are just as widely available as any present day clinical procedure.
It is in the self-interest of everyone who can significantly speed up the development of ways to reverse aging to set forth and do exactly that - but very few are making the effort. [Consider Ellison's medical foundation, or Thiel's funding of SENS as some of the few, lone examples]. At some point it will become evident to the public and the world at large that aging to death whilst surrounding by wealth is insanity in an age in which those resources could be used for the development of age-reversing medicine: ways to repair mitochondrial DNA, break down accumulated metabolic byproducts that clog up cells, clear out senescent cells, restore declining stem cell activity, and so forth. But as yet this is not obvious enough to those people who matter.
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Expanding on the part about vision versus the drive to gain greater amounts of money: it's a challenge and a rare thing to be both a zealot and very wealthy. The roads to being these things are both long and quite different; either is a process more than a thing you are:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/02/one-wealthy-zealo...
My suspicion is that it is not just longevity science that looks in vain for wealthy zealots, but that in general any grand cause that people can feel very strongly about also lacks wealthy zealots. It seems to me that there is in fact little overlap between the small population of zealots for a cause, people willing to devote their working life and significant resources to a grand project, and the small population of very wealthy people, those with a net worth of $100 million and up.
We can speculate as to why this might be. For example, I might try to argue that the sort of person who can successfully run the long and unlikely process of becoming very wealthy is the sort of person who doesn't think about what they can do with money. They are not doing what they do for money, and the process is their passion. Someone who was a zealot for a cause would have stepped off that process long before reaching the possibility of attaining a very high net worth. Having a mere seven figure net worth for most people enters the territory of being able to prioritize volunteering over working, or funding a small mission in their favored charity. The temptation to break off and work on doing good rather than continually doubling down and doubling down on the process is ever there.
Or to put it another way, the passion for the process that will make a person wealthy takes up the much the same mental space as the passion for a cause: there are only so many hours in the day, and only so much attention that a person can give to any one set of information. So you are unlikely to see a person who has (a) accomplished the necessary devotion to work and process for a shot at becoming very wealthy, but also (b) put in the necessary work and process to become a zealot.
Or to put it yet another way, neither becoming exceedingly wealthy nor becoming a zealot are things that just happen one day out of the blue. They are each a fair way down their own different paths of effort, realization, and specialization.