MJ: These Billionaires Want to Disrupt Death—and Keep Their Fortunes Forever

[Cooked Crack]

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They say the only things certain in life are death and taxes, but America’s billionaires, having taken care of the latter, are now trying to disrupt the former—and make sure nobody can pry their fortunes from their cold dead hands.

 

Four decades of nerds hitting the jackpot has brought about a gruesome parade of zillionaire techies intent on cheating the grim reaper. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Peter Thiel are among the would-be immortals sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into startups and research based on the notion, as fellow tech bro Peter Diamandis put it, that “aging is a disease” that “can be slowed, stopped, and perhaps even reversed.” 

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Suppose Thiel—who has enlisted with Alcor, were to perish out of state with his body intact. As long as he has at least $220,000 in life insurance and has kept up with his monthly dues, a field team from contractor Suspended Animation Inc. will swoop in and replace his blood with anticoagulants and chemicals to protect vital organs.

 

He will then be packed on ice for transit to Scottsdale, where the “patient” (as Alcor calls them) will be infused with (basically) antifreeze and placed under liquid nitrogen in a Bigfoot Dewar vat that can hold up to four “wholebody patients” and five “neuropatients” (head only) indefinitely. But on the off chance revival ever becomes feasible, there remains a money problem, one expressed by yet another old adage: “You can’t take it with you.”

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About a decade ago, Scottsdale attorney Mark House was working on the contested estate of a man who’d had himself frozen. In the process, he met with Alcor staff and grew smitten with the legal issues around reviving the dead. Rich “grantors” routinely use trusts to channel fortunes to their heirs. Maybe a thawed grantor could pass as his own heir! “You don’t wanna come back poor,” House explains.

 

So he dug in, and over time “I kind of developed a body of law.” House has since created some 100 “cryonic suspension trusts.” The tricky part, in theory, is that a grantor is legally required to name an “ascertainable beneficiary” before the trust must vest (dole out its assets). Nearly all US states once had a “rule against perpetuities” that capped trusts at 90 years to prevent a grantor’s “dead hand” from controlling family affairs indefinitely.

 

But the wealth protection industry has lobbied to weaken or repeal these limits. In 2008, Arizona amended its law to enable trusts that last up to 500 years, which even a Republican state attorney general deemed “likely unconstitutional.” Hugh Magill, a former chief fiduciary officer at Chicago’s Northern Trust Company, told me he’s encountered a handful of cryonics trusts, one of which sought protections for the grantor’s “bionic analog version,” a bionic “person” into which a digital copy of the grantor’s mind had been uploaded—real Black Mirror stuff. But “even the very best attorneys have a significant challenge,” he said, with trusts that “attempt to navigate this channel” between the living and the dead.

 

Also: Cryonics trusts have yet to be tested in court.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/01/alcor-cryonics-peter-thiel-billionaires-dynasty-trusts-aging-disease-death-immortality/

 

 

[Califan007 The Constipated]

1 hour ago, Cooked Crack said:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/01/alcor-cryonics-peter-thiel-billionaires-dynasty-trusts-aging-disease-death-immortality/

 

 

 

Don't they still need to dictate what happens with their fortunes if their frozen selves end up dying before they are thawed out?

[Destino]

Im ok with this with a few conditions. 
1- their wealth must reside physically with their frozen remains. No banks, no electronic anything. 
2- their frozen remains, and wealth, must be housed in secret burial chambers scattered about the globe.

3- those secret locations must be accessible only by solving puzzles built into their burial chambers and protected by deadly traps.

 

 

[Xameil]

1 hour ago, Destino said:

Im ok with this with a few conditions. 
1- their wealth must reside physically with their frozen remains. No banks, no electronic anything. 
2- their frozen remains, and wealth, must be housed in secret burial chambers scattered about the globe.

3- those secret locations must be accessible only by solving puzzles built into their burial chambers and protected by deadly traps.

 

 

So...kinda like Pharoahs?

[TheGreatBuzz]

11 minutes ago, Xameil said:

So...kinda like Pharoahs?

 

Wow.  

 

This is impressive.  Nothing gets by you.

[mcsluggo]

3 hours ago, Cooked Crack said:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/01/alcor-cryonics-peter-thiel-billionaires-dynasty-trusts-aging-disease-death-immortality/

 

 

There was a really bad Robert Heinlein book that followed almost this exact story (except the billionaire had his mind transported into the body of a woman that had died) ... and him trying to wrest ownership of his former assets from his feckless heirs.

 

Heiney wrote some great stories... this wasn't one of them 

[Destino]

47 minutes ago, Xameil said:

So...kinda like Pharoahs?

I’d hope they’d be a bit less obvious than those bozos. Not much of a challenge to find a great big gold capped pyramid in the desert, now is it? 

[China]

 

[Xameil]

4 hours ago, Destino said:

I’d hope they’d be a bit less obvious than those bozos. Not much of a challenge to find a great big gold capped pyramid in the desert, now is it? 

You say that, but first look at what those bozos do...not exactly hiding their wealth.

 

And second, like the pharohs they can make puzzles and curses, and then no one would get to their wealth. And before you say Indiana Jones could, he has problems landing his plane on the right runway now, so itd he safe from him 😉

[Destino]

54 minutes ago, Xameil said:

You say that, but first look at what those bozos do...not exactly hiding their wealth.

 

And second, like the pharohs they can make puzzles and curses, and then no one would get to their wealth. And before you say Indiana Jones could, he has problems landing his plane on the right runway now, so itd he safe from him 😉

you dare insult the honorable and mighty Henry Walton “Indiana” Jones Jr.? Listen here bucko, America’s greatest college professor and foremost expert on practical use of a bullwhip deserves respect. 
 

and those pharaohs were all talk. If they had any curse in them, it was spent on the laborers that built their trumped up cairns.