Who is Bryan Johnson: Anti-aging champion who spent $2 million a year on his body now set to shut down or sell age-reversing startup due to financial losses

Time of India

5 days ago

Bryan Johnson
, the tech entrepreneur turned
longevity
icon, is preparing to shut down his
age-reversal startup
, Blueprint, due to ongoing financial losses and his shifting philosophical priorities. The supplement-selling startup, which was born from his intense personal health experiment, aimed to commercialize parts of his $2 million-a-year
anti-aging
regimen. Despite attracting widespread media attention and a dedicated wellness following, Johnson says the business has become a distraction from his deeper mission to 'defy death.' Known for his strict diet protocols, hundreds of medical tests, and even plasma transfusions from his teenage son, Johnson is now walking away from
Blueprint
to focus fully on his emerging philosophical movement, 'Don't Die.'
Bryan Johnson's evolution from tech tycoon to immortality evangelist
Born on August 22, 1977, in Provo, Utah, and raised in nearby Springville, he grew up on a farm, helping with alfalfa and corn alongside his four siblings. After his parents divorced, he lived with his mother and stepfather. At 19, he spent two years as a missionary in Ecuador with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Returning to the United States, he earned a BA in International Studies from Brigham Young University in 2003 and later completed his MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2007.
His breakthrough came in 2007 when he founded Braintree, a mobile and web payment processing company. Bootstrapped and focused, it served clients like Airbnb, Uber, and GitHub before acquiring Venmo in 2012. The company was sold to PayPal for $800 million in 2013, netting Johnson around $300 million.
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Undo
After the sale of Braintree, he redirected his wealth into ambitious scientific ventures. He launched OS Fund with $100 million to support frontier science and, in 2016, founded Kernel, a company aimed at developing brain-monitoring neurotechnology—specifically, helmet devices capable of creating real-time models of brain activity.
However, it was his personal immersion in
Project Blueprint
, a daily regimen costing more than $2 million annually, that elevated him from entrepreneur to anti-aging evangelist.
In March 2025, Johnson introduced the 'Don't Die' movement, positioning it as a philosophical or even religious shift and asserting that existence is humanity's highest virtue. He now sees commercial ventures like Blueprint as distractions from this mission and believes that selling products undermines his credibility as a messenger of the cause.
Project Blueprint: The $2 million-a-year body experiment
Johnson's Blueprint regimen includes a vegan diet, more than 100 daily pills, exercise, sleep optimization, and near-daily tests tracking everything from liver fat to brain function. He claims to have slowed his epigenetic aging, achieving the biological metrics of an 18-year-old while in his 40s. While critics question the reproducibility and ethics of such intense interventions, Johnson has branded himself as a 'professional rejuvenation athlete,' turning his body into a living experiment in age reversal.
Why he's walking away from Blueprint
In his own words, Johnson described Blueprint the company as a 'pain-in-the-a**' venture. He no longer wants to trade his philosophical credibility for profit and admits that continuing to run a commercial enterprise distracts from his mission to reshape humanity's relationship with death. While some speculate that Blueprint's financial viability was a key reason behind his decision, Johnson emphasizes that the shift is ideological. He insists that his full attention must now be devoted to Don't Die, which he views as a new kind of spiritual framework for the age of artificial intelligence and life extension.
What's next for Bryan Johnson
Johnson says he is close to making a final decision to either sell or shut down Blueprint entirely. Moving forward, his focus will be on expanding Don't Die into a comprehensive movement—a religion, a philosophy, and potentially a post-capitalist vision for human existence. Whether seen as a visionary or an eccentric billionaire with a messiah complex, Bryan Johnson has placed himself at the center of one of the most radical and intriguing quests of our time: to stop dying altogether.
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