Silicon Valley Self Care & the Putin-Biden Chess Match
Welcome back and thanks for reading The Daily Courant, our members-only roundup of what's new at Puck.
Today, Teddy Schleifer delivers a reportorial candy bowl from San Francisco: The backstory behind Yuri Milner's $3 billion effort to live forever, with an assist from Jeff Bezos; the head-scratching data on Mark Zuckerberg's favorite charity; and more dish from MacKenzie world. (Sign up for The Stratosphere to get Teddy’s weekly email in your inbox.)
Plus, below the fold: Julia Ioffe provides a timely update on the Russia-Ukraine standoff, and the gossip inside the White House about Volodymyr Zelensky.
The inside conversation about Silicon Valley’s favorite charity, MacKenzie Scott’s personnel question, and Bezos’ latest effort to perfect his physique. For as long as I can remember, journalists and supposedly savvy observers have been reflexively dismissive, if not outright hostile, to Silicon Valley’s ongoing obsession with life-extension research. There is, after all, something seemingly contemptible—and a little bit funny—about billionaires wasting money on futile efforts to live forever. The very notion brings to mind the stories about Peter Thiel injecting himself with teenage blood (something he has denied), or Larry Ellison deadpanning that death just “never made any sense to me,” or Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil signing up to have their bodies cryogenically frozen.
That’s not a stereotype: tech leaders have provided much of the funding in the life-extension field, through both philanthropy and for-profit investing. At a time when real people are suffering from more devastating problems—malnutrition in the developing world, Black maternal mortality in the United States, not to mention the latest strands of COVID-19—it can feel out of touch, even unseemly, to see very wealthy people focusing on the one thing they themselves cannot escape… death.
But that kneejerk skepticism can also lead folks to ignore the potential benefits of aging research, which could have major implications for our understanding of associated diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Breakthroughs in the field would be an unalloyed good—for our families, for our loved ones, for the productivity of our economy (OK, maybe not for our entitlement budgets)...
FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT 
With apologies to Wall Street, the streamer's stock price apocalypse is a market problem more than a business problem. MATTHEW BELLONI 
Notes on a crazy 36 hours, brinkmanship, Ted Cruz, and a bewildered Ukrainian premier. JULIA IOFFE 
Despite the narrative, Trump and DeSantis don’t hate one another’s guts. Instead, they are involved in a more complex game theory. TINA NGUYEN 
Notes on Peloton’s market value collapse, Netflix’s future, M&A arbitrage, and Apollo’s next potential pound of flesh. WILLIAM D. COHAN 
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