Multimillionaire biohacker spends $2m a year to become 18 again. How and why?

A multi-millionaire who used his teenage son’s blood plasma in his pursuit of eternal youth has been told he now looks the same age as him – despite the three-decade age gap.

Bryan Johnson, 47, has devoted his entire adult life to his anti-ageing quest after selling his tech company Braintree Venmo to PayPal for $800m in 2013.

He now spends a staggering $2m a year on his mission to become 18 again, the same age as his son.

Sharing a picture of himself with his son on Instagram, the entrepreneur encouraged other adults to teach their children “the ways of don’t die.”

He explained that this involves leading by example and cited the simpler methods he uses in his quest to live forever – adequate sleep, a nutritious diet, exercise and surrounding himself with friends and a community.

However, as Johnson has previously revealed, he is willing to try much more extreme techniques to become 18 again, including the “world’s first multigenerational plasma exchange” with his son, then 17, and 70-year-old father.

But despite using a team of 30 doctors in the hope that it would help to reduce cognitive decline, he reported that there were “no benefits detected”.

“Young plasma exchange may be beneficial for biologically older populations or certain conditions,” he later wrote on Twitter/X. “Does not in my case stack benefit on top of my existing interventions.”

But if the reactions to this social media post are anything to go by, Johnson’s “existing interventions” – which do also include cosmetic procedures – are working.

The most-liked comment simply reads: “You know you made it when your son could pass as your sibling.”

A second viewer questioned: “Which one is the father and the son?”

“You gentlemen definitely look like siblings!” wrote a third. “You’re going to be tough to beat at the Rejuvenation Olympics.”

But multimillionaire Johnson is not just taking social media user’s word for it and recently revealed that he has scientifically slowed the ageing process to the point where he only celebrates his birthday every 19 months.

He claims to have achieved this feat through a process known as follistatin gene therapy, which he began in September last year.

This is a technique, initially proven successful in mice, that increases the body’s production of follistatin – a protein used in muscle growth, inflammation, and fertility.

“My muscle mass is up by 7 per cent (already in the 99th percentile),” he wrote on 18 June before adding: “My follistatin levels increased by 160 per cent (2 weeks post-injection).”

He said that he is now ageing at a rate of 0.64, which he describes as a “personal best”.

While Johnson was clearly pleased with this progress, later in June, he underwent yet another procedure in a bid to stop the hands of time.

He had “a cutting-edge therapy aimed at achieving age 18 joints”, which saw him have 300 million young Swedish bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells were injected into my shoulders, hips [and] joints.”

“Sleep, diet, and exercise remain foundational,” he admitted, before adding: “These next-generation therapies further bolster our chances of being the first generation that has the choice of saying yes to continuous tomorrows.”

Johnson previously told The Independent that he once led a very unhealthy lifestyle but turned his life around after creating a system to take “better care of me than I could of myself.”

“I would routinely commit self-destructive behaviours, and specifically in the evening at seven o’clock, I would try to soothe my stress by eating food,” Johnson recalled. “And that caused me to gain a lot of weight, and that caused me to not sleep very well, which then caused me to not feel very well in life.”

“I basically removed myself from taking care of myself and built a system in place that takes better care of me than I could of myself,” he said.

“The data is compelling that if you do these things and you do these things well, you can slow your rate of ageing,” Johnson added.

“That you can have dramatic effects on your body. It really is just basically saying it’s worth it to do the basic things we’re all told. And if you do them in a rigorous way, you can expect to have meaningful results in the speed at which you age and your overall health… In this phase of the project, it really is about slowing the rate of ageing.”

The Independent has reached out to Johnson for further comment.