How billionaires die

10 years. 389 deaths. $2.2T. And the biological ceiling money can't break. Yet.

Imagine you've finally joined the club of the ultra-rich. Now it's time to enjoy it for as long as possible, right? You can buy everything, but can you buy more time? You have access to the world's best healthcare, personal trainers, nutritionists, and cutting-edge treatments. With all that at your disposal, you'd expect to live longer. Do you? Are there secret longevity clinics or elite interventions reserved for those who are willing to spend?

I decided to look at the 2015–2025 data and compiled 389 billionaire deaths, totaling $2.2T in wealth at death. Over this decade, we lost titans like Gordon Moore (Intel), Giorgio Armani (Armani), Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA), Dietrich Mateschitz (Red Bull), Bertrand Puech (Hermès), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), finance legends Charlie Munger (Berkshire Hathaway) and Jim Simons (RenTech), and hundreds of other brilliant minds who created trillions of dollars of value for humanity and made the world a better place.

What I learned about billionaire deaths

Three things stand out at a first glance: (1) six helicopter crashes, (2) a surprisingly large “not disclosed” bucket, and (3) for the cases where a cause is known, death is predominantly (in 90% of cases) aging-related. Billionaires, like everyone else, gradually lose physical and cognitive function and die from an age-associated disease, or “peacefully,” “in their sleep,” “surrounded by family” (all euphemisms for aging doing what aging does).

External causes account for 7% of deaths with known causes - somewhat above the 2.5-6% range typical in top life-expectancy countries. But this is likely inflated by reporting bias: helicopter crashes and homicides make headlines, while a quiet death from heart failure often goes unexplained in obituaries. When calculated against all deaths (including undisclosed), external causes drop to 5%. So does the same appetite for risk that drives outsized returns also put billionaires in harm’s way more often? I can’t say.

What I can say: six helicopter crashes in a decade, in a population of a few hundred, is hard to ignore. There’s a tragic irony here - helicopters are often used to compress travel time, yet for six billionaires they cut life short instead. Kobe Bryant’s crash might first come to mind, but he was not a billionaire at the time of death, so he was not included in this research. The most notorious crash in the dataset is Petr Kellner (then the richest person in the Czech Republic), whose helicopter went down while heliskiing in Alaska.

Another notable finding: billionaires and families appear very secretive about details. For 30% of deaths, I could not find cause-of-death details in commemoration articles or reporting. True wealth is indeed quite quiet - and the higher average age in the undisclosed group (87.2 vs 82.87 overall) suggests the “aging-related” share is likely understated.

Can money buy years?

So can you buy your way into living longer? I compared billionaire ages at death against Hong Kong - the world's life expectancy leader and a benchmark for what top-tier public health can achieve on its own.

Female longevity advantage vanishes

Female billionaires’ mean age at death is 83.5 - roughly 4.5 years below Hong Kong’s female life expectancy at birth (88.0). On this admittedly crude benchmark (I’ll refine it shortly), the female billionaire average sits closer to countries like Croatia or Estonia than to the longevity frontier.

More striking: the usual 5-7 year gap between male and female lifespan nearly disappears. Male billionaires die at 82.8, females at 83.5 - statistically indistinguishable (p=0.75). Whatever drives female longevity in the general population appears muted at the billionaire level, though with only 32 female deaths, this finding warrants caution.

Do male billionaires live longer?

At first glance, billionaire mean age at death (82.8) barely exceeds Hong Kong's male life expectancy at birth (82.5) and is below life expectancy at 50 (84.0). But this comparison is misleading - it ignores when billionaires enter the population and how long they remain at risk, likely underestimating any advantage.

To get a cleaner estimate, I conducted a person-years analysis (see Methodology Note), tracking how much time billionaires spent in each age band and comparing observed deaths to what Hong Kong mortality rates would predict. The analysis suggests male billionaires have 29% lower mortality than Hong Kong’s general population - with billionaires who reach 50 living to a median age of 90, roughly four years longer than their Hong Kong peers.

This more rigorous estimate is likely a ceiling, however. Multiple selection effects inflate the apparent advantage:

• Billionaires must survive long enough to accumulate wealth in the first place

• The traits that build fortunes (discipline, education, low time preference) may independently promote longevity

• Those whose health deteriorates may lose their billionaire status before death - selling assets, losing business focus, or depleting wealth on medical care - and thus exit our sample

The true causal effect of wealth on lifespan is probably smaller than these numbers suggest.

Even so, the pattern is instructive. The mortality advantage concentrates in ages 60-89, where billionaires show significantly lower death rates. But after 90, the advantage vanishes - billionaire mortality becomes statistically indistinguishable from Hong Kong’s general population. The Gompertz law of biological aging eventually overwhelms whatever protection wealth provides.

So what is the bottom line?

Extreme wealth may buy some time - but less than you’d expect, and not nearly enough.

• For men: The billionaire longevity dividend appears to fall somewhere between 0 and 4 years beyond the world’s healthiest population. Selection biases make the true number hard to pin down - but it’s clearly not transformative.

• For women: Billionaire status appears to come at a cost. Female billionaires die 4.5 years earlier than leading life expectancy benchmark. The usual 5-7 year female survival advantage over men nearly disappears. With only 32 deaths in the sample, this finding warrants caution, but the pattern is striking.

• For everyone over 90: The advantage vanishes entirely. Billionaire mortality at 90+ is statistically indistinguishable from Hong Kong’s general population. No amount of money has yet bought anyone an escape from the Gompertz curve.

The best healthcare money can buy appears to help manage the diseases of middle and late age - heart disease, cancer, metabolic conditions. What it cannot do is slow the underlying process. After 90, biology collects what it’s owed regardless of net worth. This doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless. It means the solution isn’t personal health spending - it’s research.

What does this mean for today’s richest people?

To make this concrete, I modelled the projected life expectancy for today's ten richest people, using the age-specific mortality ratios from this study applied to the most long-lived nation’s (Hong Kong) life tables. Nine out of ten have already lived more than half their expected lifespan.

What would actually move the needle

The best individual strategy today remains unglamorous: healthy lifestyle, top-tier health system, low risk exposure. Personal health optimization - executive physicals, concierge medicine, experimental protocols - can detect and manage disease, but the returns diminish rapidly. Our data doesn’t distinguish health-conscious billionaires from the rest. Even so, the 90+ convergence applies to all of them - suggesting the ceiling is biological, not behavioral. Past a certain point, more spending on personal health buys nothing.

What could change the equation is not personal spending but research spending. The only historically reliable driver of longer life expectancy is technological progress. Sanitation extended life. Antibiotics extended life. Vaccines extended life. Because most causes of death today are aging-related, the next leap requires solving aging itself - and that is a funding problem as much as a scientific one.

The funding gap is staggering. Over the past decade, 246 billionaires worth $1.56 trillion died of aging-related causes. Yet the WSJ estimates that the entire ultra-wealthy class have put $5B into longevity ventures over the past 25 years (about ~$200M/year). The average billionaire dying of aging held $6.3B - more than the field’s entire quarter-century of funding from ultra-wealthy investors. A single additional commitment at that scale could materially change the pace of progress.

Where to deploy capital

This section draws on conversations with leading researchers and funders in the field - and barely scratches the surface. If you’re serious about allocating capital to longevity, I’m happy to help you navigate the landscape. What follows is a starting framework. These levels are additive, not exclusive. As your capacity grows, add more - don’t replace what already works at smaller scale:

Any amount: Advocacy and awareness

Advocacy has a proven track record. US federal dementia research funding grew 5x from $0.6B to $3B annually between 2015 and 2021. The entire NIH budget doubled during 1998-2003. These shifts happened because specific individuals made them a priority. Bringing more resources and political will to longevity research - through public advocacy, policy engagement, or simply talking about it - is high-leverage at any wealth level. Easiest next step - join and/or fund Vitalism, Longevity Biotech Fellowship and The Longevity Initiative.

$5M-$50M: Fund what others won’t

The most impactful use of modest capital is filling gaps that neither industry nor government will fund. Become an LP in longevity-focused venture funds. Fund aging clinical trials. The FDA is beginning to engage with aging as a treatable condition, but pharma won’t invest without proof-of-concept trials that only philanthropic capital can fund. Support aligned nonprofits that allocate >90% of funds to research (Impetus Grants, LEV Foundation, Thalion Initiative).

$50M-$500M: Build institutions and biobanks

Launch or endow an aging biology institute with a 10+ year horizon. Fund large longitudinal human biobanks. UK Biobank with costs on the order of 0.5B has resulted in tens of thousand scientific papers and hundreds of novel drugs. A biobank specifically designed for longitudinal detailed aging data would be a step change.

$1B+: Launch a megaproject

The precedent is clear: the Human Genome Project cost ~$3B and generated an estimated $141 in economic impact for every $1 invested. The Large Hadron Collider costs $7-10B. The International Space Station costs $105-145B. A longevity megaproject, a consortium of institutes and companies with a single aim: to solve aging, could help billions live longer and healthier lives.

If you are wondering what would be the most impactful thing you can do for humanity - this is it. Solving aging is the most philanthropic thing you can do: for yourself, for your parents, for your loved ones, and for humanity as a whole.

Special thanks to those who helped shape this research

Nathan Cheng, Alexander Fedintsev, Andrew Steele, Alex Sviridov, Kirill Denisov, Judith Mueller, Danila Immortalist, Yan Granat, Daniel Kravtsov, Adam Gries, Artemy Shumskiy, Mark Hamalainen, Vladimir Shakirov, Martin Borch Jensen, Rakhan Aimbetov, Mike Batin, Thomas Ahlström, Laurence Ion, Simon Steshin, Aaron King

Methodology Notes

1. I used only trusted sources (Forbes, Bloomberg, Hurun) to verify whether someone was a billionaire at the time of death. This likely excludes some de facto billionaires (e.g., crypto holders, owners of opaque private assets, or individuals who kept a low profile), so the analytical set is probably conservative.

2. Methodologically, comparing a billionaire death sample to national populations is inherently imperfect. People are not “born into” a billionaire population in the same way they are born into a country: billionaire status is time-varying and arises through wealth creation or inheritance. Even the closest apples-to-apples benchmark (e.g., comparing death distributions conditional on surviving to age 50) can be criticized on selection grounds.

3. I did not distinguish between self-made and inherited billionaires. First-generation founders may have spent decades working extreme hours before achieving wealth, potentially offsetting health benefits. Whether inherited wealth confers a stronger longevity advantage is an open question.

4. Mechanisms likely inflate the observed billionaire mortality advantage:

   1. Survivor bias. Must live long enough to accumulate $1B+. Excludes early deaths, inflating the advantage.

   2. Healthy founder effect. Traits enabling wealth creation (discipline, education, stress tolerance) may independently promote longevity, conflating the wealth effect with trait selection.

   3. Late entry. Median age at first Forbes appearance is 57; 18% enter at 70+. Wealth may not have influenced earlier health.

   4. Pre-death wealth loss. Individuals whose health deteriorates may lose billionaire status before death, through asset sales, reduced business performance, or medical expenses, and exit the Forbes-tracked population. Systematically excludes deaths preceded by health decline.

   5. Unstable threshold. Net worths fluctuating around $1B may drop below threshold during illness. Sicker individuals are less likely to remain in sample.

The pre-death wealth loss bias is particularly insidious: it creates a sample where healthier individuals are mechanically overrepresented, because illness causes exit from the population before death can be observed.

Implication: The SMR of 0.71 (29% mortality advantage) should be interpreted as an upper bound. The true causal effect of wealth on mortality is likely smaller, though the magnitude of this bias cannot be precisely estimated from available data.

Full methodology is posted here.

High Resolution Figures for your decks and other media

How Billionaires Die, Causes of deaths Sankey chart

Male billionaires vs longest-lived nations

Top 10 living billionaire life expectancy