🚀 FP! Week In Review, Briefly #15

In Case You Missed It ...

⚔️☠️ The billionaire war against death (Sunday)

🤖👴 AI vs. age: The great offset (Monday)

😀😱 Of Pluribus and progress (Wednesday)

💰🧪 Funding outside the box: A Quick Q&A with … philanthropy expert Stuart Buck (Thursday)

⤵ Up Wing/Down Wing

A selection of pro-progress and anti-progress news items from the past week.

⤴ Up Wing Things

• Trump administration launches bold air-taxi push - Wash Post

• Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman: ‘AI Is Already Superhuman’ - Bberg

• Startup Emerges From Stealth Aiming to Beam Solar Energy From Space - Heatmap

• Google launched its deepest AI research agent yet — on the same day OpenAI dropped GPT-5.2 - TechCrunch

• Solar geoengineering startups are getting serious - MIT Technology Review

• Trump Signs Executive Order to Curtail State AI Laws - WSJ

• The potential of GLP-1 drugs to transform medicine exploded in 2025 - New Scientist

• Ford’s Car of the Future, Hatched in a Skunk Works Near Los Angeles - NYT

• CEOs Are All-In on AI - WSJ

• In a major new report, scientists build rationale for sending astronauts to Mars - Ars Technica

⤵ Down Wing Things

• Arizona city rejects data center after AI lobbying push - POLITICO

• What’s worse for innovation: MAGA or Mao? - The Economist

• AI Hackers Are Coming Dangerously Close to Beating Humans - WSJ

• Data center boom creates political conundrum for the GOP - E&E

• Americans are using and worrying about AI more than ever, survey finds - Axios

• 2025 is the second hottest year since records began - New Scientist

• China’s open-source AI is a national advantage - FT

• CDC Panel’s Hepatitis B Vaccine Vote Undid Decades of Progress - BBerg

Essays and Q&As

⚔️☠️ The Billionaire War Against Death

Why It Matters. For the superrich, radical longevity has shifted from symbolism to strategy. A desire that once manifested in pyramids, alchemy, and charitable foundations is now a serious investment thesis. Billionaires increasingly treat aging not as fate, but as a technical problem whose solution needs merely to be financed.

What’s New. Silicon Valley and finance elites are pouring billions into cellular reprogramming, age-reversal drugs, and longevity platforms. UBS reports roughly four in five billionaires now expect to live much longer than previous generations — and believe science will deliver.

The Trend Line. This bet builds on steady progress. Goldman Sachs shows the longevity frontier has risen by about 0.25 years per year