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At Davos this year, Elon Musk described human aging as a “very solvable problem.” In early January 2026, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said much the same thing on Peter Diamandis’ Moonshots podcast.

The statement itself is not revelatory. Aging will eventually be brought under control.* Nor is Musk an authority on biogerontology. His contribution to the discussion has at times amounted to little more than armchair pattern recognition - such as noting that he has never seen “someone with an old left arm and a young right arm” and drawing wild conclusions from that.

* But, as over 100.000 people die because of aging EVERY DAY, we need to solve it as fast as possible.

What is notable is who is saying it.

For years, Musk has treated aging as both inevitable and desirable. As recently as late last year, he was still repeating the familiar trope that an ageless world would lead to cultural or societal stagnation - that death is necessary to “make room” for the next generation.

Vitalism Foundation* co-founder Adam Gries has said that “people are strangely bipolar about aging and death”. We celebrate science, but treat aging as uniquely “inevitable” regardless of evidence. We say we accept death at the average lifespan, then spend lavishly to buy marginal extra time.

* For the sake of transparency: LEVITY is a certified Vitalist organization.

This contradiction cuts across society, largely independent of background or status. What is harder to explain is that it persists even among the class Musk belongs to: high-net-worth individuals (HNWI).

Musk has set his sights on Mars. Yet if nothing changes, his final frontier - like everyone else’s - will be death.

From a strictly rational perspective, the case is almost trivial. For any HNWI, allocating serious capital to solving aging should be the dominant priority. The reason is simple, and it reduces to a question most people already know the answer to:

Would you rather be 25 and broke - or 100 and obscenely rich?

There are thousands of billionaires globally, controlling roughly $18T in wealth. Yet only a tiny fraction funds longevity R&D.

This year Vitalism Foundation is trying to operationalize the HNWI gap. They’re doing a systematic survey of high-net-worth individuals to understand (and influence) how they think about aging, death, and funding longevity - so capital-mobilization strategies hopefully could be based on better data.

Vitalism is also building the High-Net-Worth Longevity Nexus and a Vitalist Billionaire’s Club - explicitly to solve the coordination failure that keeps wealthy individuals inactive.

If even a small percentage of HNWI portfolios treat longevity as a serious frontier, the field’s constraints change: more shots on goal, better trials, faster iteration, less dependence on slow politics.

So yes, say what you want about Elon Musk. But when he says “solvable” on a Davos stage, it hints that he may finally be re-evaluating what actually matters. And if the world’s richest man begins to take aging seriously, there is little doubt that others in the high-net-worth class will pay attention - and follow. That is precisely the shift Vitalism is working to catalyze.