The Enhanced Games, a new sporting competition explicitly designed to allow performance-enhancing drugs, looks like a publicity stunt for the techno-macho era: Olympic athletes on steroids competing for million-dollar bounties in Las Vegas. But co-founder Aron D’Souza has a 90% gross margin telehealth business in mind, and a pitch to governments struggling with aging populations.
Launching in May 2026 with Peter Thiel’s backing, the Games promise $1 million bounties for breaking world records. Former Olympic athletes like sprinter Fred Kerley and swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev have already signed up to compete. The goal isn’t just to smash world records while fans cheer. It’s to build a marketing engine for a longevity industry that D’Souza believes will be worth trillions.
“We use sports marketing to sell a human enhancement product,” D’Souza said on a recent episode of Equity. “It’s a telehealth service like Hims or Roman, except we [will] have evidence that the best and fastest athletes in the world use our protocols.”
The business model is borrowed from Red Bull – extreme sports as advertisement for the product – but the product isn’t an energy drink. It’s testosterone, growth hormone, or whatever else can keep humans competitive with machines and productive into their 70s and beyond.
While the Games are seen as controversial, D’Souza is betting the ick factor fades once people see athletes in their 30s and 40s smash world records. He and billionaire co-founder Christian Angermayer have raised “double-digit millions” on this theory and poached executives from the U.S. Olympic Committee, Red Bull, and FIFA to build what D’Souza calls a mission to “upgrade all of humanity.”
“I believe that when Fred [Kerley] breaks [Usain Bolt’s] 100-meter world record in Vegas next year, it will be a watershed moment to show that enhanced humans are better than ordinary humans,” he said.
Put another way: if Sputnik launched the space age and ChatGPT launched the AI boom, D’Souza thinks a juiced sprint could launch the human enhancement era – and unlock the same flood of investment.
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Longevity startups raised $8.5 billion in 2024 as interest in lifespan extension moved from fringe obsession to mainstream investment thesis. The appeal spans from billionaires funding anti-aging research to everyday Americans turning to direct-to-consumer health tracking when traditional healthcare fails them.
But D’Souza believes longevity isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s becoming a need-to-have in the face of ever-aging populations and ever-smarter machines.
In many parts of the world, falling birth rates have put major global economies on the path toward population collapse. A recent McKinsey study found fertility rates are declining below the replacement rate pretty much everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa. Many countries have used immigration to address the challenges of an aging population, since immigrants usually arrive at a younger working age, fill in critical labor gaps, and tend to have more children.
But mass migration has triggered a political backlash in Europe and the U.S., where right-wing parties have gained ground by stoking fears about immigration and national identity. Immigration has been a central issue of Donald Trump’s presidency, and D’Souza reckons the issue could push far-right leaders in countries like Germany, France, and the U.K. into power.
“If you’re against mass immigration, you end up with this demographic model that looks like Japan,” D’Souza said, adding that Japan’s average age (49.8 years old) makes it one of the oldest populations in the world.
“So how do you reconcile the desire for economic growth with an anti-immigration modality?” he continued. “Well, the solution has to be longevity and human enhancement, because there’s no other way. We need a young, working, tax-paying population, and that doesn’t stack up with low birth rates.”
It’s a stark pitch: Rather than embrace immigration or expand social safety nets that might encourage higher birth rates, just enhance humans to work longer. D’Souza dismissed the policy alternatives – Europe already tried supporting families, he says, and it failed to bring birth rates up.
Given this backdrop, the Enhanced Games has some predictable backers, including Thiel and Donald Trump Jr., through his VC firm 1789 Ventures. D’Souza describes both as “obsessive about the demographics of the nation.” Thiel has poured money into longevity startups including Retro Biosciences, Unity Biotechnology, and NewLimit, which he co-founded with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong in 2021.
Of course, many of the Games’ same investors are also betting billions that artificial general intelligence (AGI) — essentially, AI that can perform any intellectual task that a human can — will soon do most jobs better than humans can. Which raises the question: If AGI is coming, why bother extending our working years at all?
“We have the Sam [Altman] view of the world, which is that AGI will come, it will replace all the humans, and then the humans are basically a second-class species because there will be a superior species in the machines,” D’Souza said. “And I think the inevitable consequence of that, which Sam won’t admit, is that humans [become] irrelevant.”
The alternate paradigm D’Souza is proposing? A competition between humans and machines.
“The machines are getting better in real time, and because of outdated regulations, particularly by the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti Doping Agency… human enhancement is stifled, and so we aren’t able to upgrade fast enough to compete with the machines,” he continued. “Now, my goal is to ensure that humans can remain competitive with the machines.”
The problem with this species-level framing, though, is that not all humans will necessarily get the upgrade.
D’Souza says “technology diffusion” will lead to a sort of trickle-down enhancement, where what’s suitable for champion athletes becomes therapy for people who do things like CrossFit, and then becomes more suitable for more non-athletes. But the business model – premium telehealth services marketed through elite athletes – points toward a potential reality where the wealthy get enhanced, and everyone else gets older.
When I suggested that enhancement technologies would likely reach the wealthiest first — and that elites might hoard access to these capabilities — D’Souza didn’t push back.
“I think that is a potentially pernicious consequence of human enhancement,” he said.
