Biohacker Bryan Johnson posted on X Tuesday that he’s “been thinking things over and wonder if i’ve taken this whole longevity thing too far.”
The 47-year-old entrepreneur is best known for his aggressive quest for eternal youth.
Johnson, the transhumanist founder of the neurotechnology company Kernel, sold his digital payments company Braintree to eBay Inc. for $800 million in 2013, then pursued his bio-hacking obsession headlong, tinkering with his body in the hope of pausing the aging process and potentially even evading death.
The reversal comes after years of increasingly extreme experiments.
In a 2023 interview with Bloomberg, Johnson revealed that in addition to staying out of the sun, he was preparing to invest at least $2 million in his body with the aim of having the body and organs — penis and rectum included — of an 18-year-old, and hired a team of over 30 doctors and health experts to monitor his every bodily function.
Johnson, the self-declared “biohacker” who used blood transfusions from his teenage son in his quest for eternal youth, has revealed he suffers from a condition known as autoimmune gastritis (AIG).
In early July, he announced the diagnosis on social media.
Johnson wrote “Bad news #1: I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself.”
He said he hoped to “solve” the disease, which occurs when the body’s immune system attacks healthy stomach-lining cells, but admitted it was incurable.
The disease diagnosis follows a year of visible setbacks.
Johnson posted to his Instagram in November 2024 a jarring close-up of his face, bloated and red, after an attempt to inject a “donor’s” fat into his face to attain a more youthful look.
“I got really lean and lost a lot of fat—especially in my face. My biomarkers were improving, but I looked gaunt,” Johnson wrote in his caption.
His body quickly rejected the fat, though.
Despite the setbacks, Johnson has continued pushing forward with new experiments.
“I just cloned myself…as a newborn,” biohacker Bryan Johnson announced on social media Tuesday, explaining that his clone, which “lives in a petri dish for now,” will be used as his own personal blood boy, to test therapies on, for growing organs if he ever needed a transplant, developing new treatments and injecting its young cells.
He defended the cloning venture as necessary progress.
“This may be scary to some people…a dystopian future,” he admitted. “But, for others, they will see it as the inevitable future of health.”
Johnson also remained defiant about his path to immortality, stating the diagnosis opened new doors.
“I mentioned getting diagnosed with an incurable disease is one of the best things that has happened to me in a long time. It’s opened up a frontier of new paths to repair and strengthen the body.”
In the viral moment that defined his public persona, Johnson underwent what was billed as “the world’s first multigenerational plasma exchange” in April 2023 with his father Richard and son Talmage.
The tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, 45, turned up at a health services clinic near Dallas with his 70-year-old father Richard and 17-year-old son Talmage, and, over the course of several hours, the men (and boy) engaged in a tri-generational swapping of their blood plasma.
His hefty team of 30-plus doctors approved the protocol as a way to potentially influence age-related brain decline, but Johnson ultimately concluded there were “no benefits” after religiously checking a range of biomarkers from his fluid.
Johnson nonetheless continued the experiment with a twist, moving away from family blood altogether.
Johnson, the tech entrepreneur and biohacker known for his radical anti-aging quest, has switched from the controversial practice of injecting his son’s blood to a total plasma exchange.
According to Johnson, his TPE treatment involves removing all his blood, separating the plasma, and replacing it with a solution containing 5% albumin and intravenous immunoglobulin.
Johnson maintains his bigger dream remains intact despite doubts.
The entrepreneur who famously spends millions each year trying to slow his own aging has a new target in his sights: he wants to make humans immortal by 2039.
The 48-year-old said that the 14-year goal is based on “new, promising therapies that can turn back the clock decades,” while adding that thanks to AI, it’s actually a very “reasonable target.”
He also pivoted his mission beyond profit.
Johnson started his own antiaging startup, Blueprint, and recently founded his own religion, and says he’s thinking of closing or selling Blueprint to focus on his religion instead.
“Honestly, I am so close to either shutting it down or selling it,” he told Wired’s Katie Drummond, adding that he’d “been talking to people about this.” “I don’t need the money, and it’s a pain-in-the-ass company,” he said.
The admission of doubt marks a striking shift from his public posture of certainty.
Johnson, who says he’s aging at a rate of 0.64 years for every chronological year and celebrates his birthday every 19 months, shared Instagram and TikTok videos from recent gatherings.
Critics have long questioned the science backing his methods.
Ramkumar Hariharan, a senior scientist at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University who studies all aspects of human longevity, says the smoke of marketing can overshadow the science, and while there are some therapies that have shown promise in the push to extend life, such as rapamycin, there isn’t one diet, protocol or therapy that has delivered the fountain of youth.
Johnson downplayed expectations around his ambitions even as he doubled down.
First, he argued, his team just need to fix some of the “buggy” issues, like therapies that are “mistakenly causing cancer.”
Johnson’s next event is his Don’t Die Summit, continuing to promote his longevity movement globally.