wanting to live forever without disease? that's more like God than a kingTech Billionaires Already Captured the White House. They Still Want to Be Kings | WIRED
The shirtless man in the golden mask and cape has plans to lead his own country one day. There is no location yet, but it will be a crypto- and AI-powered paradise of medical experimentation, filled with people who want to “make death optional,” he says.For now, though, he’s leading a sparsely attended rave on the second floor of a San Francisco office building. A DJ is spinning at one end of an open room. A handful of people sway and jump on the space cleared out as a dance floor. It’s 10 am. At a nearby table, coffee is available with many alternative milks.
The man in the mask is Laurence Ion, a programmer from Romania. After winning a Google Code-in competition as a teenager, he worked for various startups and became what he describes as “financially free.” Four years ago, Ion helped launch VitaDAO, a decentralized organization for bankrolling longevity research, which attracted funding from Balaji Srinivasan, a former biotech founder and Coinbase executive, and the drug company Pfizer’s venture arm. Now 31, Ion is part of a crowd of self-styled future-builders that includes Vitalik Buterin, the billionaire cocreator of the Ethereum protocol.
Ion helped organize Zuzalu, Buterin’s 2023 “pop-up city” for life extensionists at a resort in Montenegro, and another pop-up called Vitalia, on an island off the Honduran coast. For his latest project, Viva City, Ion has booked this 16-story office building on Market Street. Once the headquarters of Burning Man, it turned into a WeWork, then into Frontier Tower. For the six weeks that Ion and his citizens-to-be are here—bonding over life extension, playing with blockchain and crypto and AI, and maybe occasionally sleeping over—the place will be known as Viva Frontier Tower.
The vibe here is more summer camp than city-state. But in a speech to the 100 or so people who attend the first day of a weekend boot camp, Ion underscores just how personal the project is for him. “I spent a lot of time in hospitals,” he says. He was born with a disease called multiple osteochondromas, which causes bone tumors that are most often benign but can be painful. “I know what it's like to feel frail, and I don't want more of that as I age,” he says.
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