The physician, XPRIZE founder and serial entrepreneur behind some of the most audacious bets in modern science tells Beyond the Boardroom why longevity is the defining luxury of our time, why the wealthy getting there first is a feature not a flaw, and why abundance, biological or otherwise, was never a question of if but when.
“Which parts are you not believing?”
It’s a pointed response, and he means it. Peter Diamandis is mid-conversation with Beyond the Boardroom in a hotel suite overlooking Marina Bay Sands, somewhere between engagements on a whirlwind Singapore trip. He’s time-crunched and we know it, but the moment pushback surfaces about whether governments will adapt to a world reshaped by AI, longevity and abundance, whether institutions built around scarcity, traditional work and existing power structures can bend, and whether the future he describes with such certainty will actually arrive on schedule, something shifts. He leans forward. He’s unafraid of debate.
This is who Diamandis is. At 64, the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, co-founder of Singularity University and architect of Fountain Life, a precision health and longevity company, he has spent three decades being called a techno-optimist, and three decades proving the label insufficient. He’s written six books, four of them New York Times bestsellers. He’s founded more than 25 companies. His venture fund, BOLD Capital Partners, is deployed principally into exponential technology and biotech, and his annual Abundance360 summit draws the most consequential entrepreneurs and investors in the world. The body of work is, by any measure, formidable. What drives it is simpler: an unshakeable conviction that technology does not merely improve life for those who can afford it. Given enough time and scale, it transforms life for everyone. The wealthy just get there first. To Diamandis, that is not a flaw in the system, but the system itself.
The Career Behind the Conviction
Diamandis was born in the Bronx in 1961 to Greek immigrant parents, both physicians. He completed dual degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering at MIT before crossing to Harvard Medical School for his MD, though clinical practice was never the destination. By the time he finished Harvard, he had already co-founded the International Space University and was running a microsatellite launch company. The credentials were infrastructure for something larger, not an end in themselves.
That something took its most definitive form in 1994 when he founded the XPRIZE Foundation, shaped by a parallel he had found in Charles Lindbergh’s memoir. The $25,000 Orteig Prize that motivated Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic crossing had not merely rewarded a single flight, it had catalysed an industry. A sufficiently audacious prize, he reasoned, could do the same for private spaceflight. He announced the competition in 1996 without prize money secured, without confirmed teams, and without a clear path to funding either. Eight years later, in October 2004 SpaceShipOne (designed by aerospace legend Burt Rutan and backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen) flew to space twice in five days and claimed the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE, and Richard Branson had licensed the technology for Virgin Galactic. The vehicle now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum beside Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, a placement Diamandis had envisioned from the beginning.
Diamandis’ XPRIZE board of trustees has over the years included Elon Musk, Larry Page, James Cameron and Ratan Tata. His relationship with Musk is long and substantive: Musk funded the $100 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition in 2021, and the two have maintained a running dialogue about AI’s trajectory and its economic consequences. The convergence between them is telling. Both are working, from different positions, on the same question. What happens to human ambition when the most powerful tools in history become available to everyone?
His 2012 book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, co-authored with Steven Kotler, set out the intellectual framework that has underpinned everything since. Its argument is that exponential technologies—AI, robotics, synthetic biology, renewable energy, digital medicine—are systematically converting scarce resources into abundant ones, and that human psychology, wired for threat-detection, is structurally poor at registering progress at scale.
But for Diamandis, abundance is not simply about having more. It’s about the collapse of bottlenecks that once defined modern life, from access to intelligence, education, transport, entertainment and healthcare to opportunity itself. In his telling, we already live surrounded by forms of abundance that have become so normalised we barely register them. The world’s best university lectures are free online. The most sophisticated AI tools on earth are available through a smartphone. Low-cost transport, limitless entertainment and near-instant access to information have all shifted from privilege to expectation in less than a generation. Abundance, in Diamandis’ world, is not the absence of inequality. Rather, it’s the repeated historical pattern by which what begins as privilege becomes infrastructure. The wealthy get there first. Then the price curve does its work.
It’s little wonder the book became a New York Times bestseller and has been a fixture of the global technology conversation since. However, the debate around it has been equally sustained. Critics, including those writing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, have argued that the framework is more convincing as a technology story than a social one, and that inequality, the most obvious structural barrier to the abundance he describes, deserves more weight than the original work gave it. Diamandis has engaged with this more directly over time. A proposal he co-authored with Lemonade CEO Daniel Schreiber in early 2026 outlines the MOSAIC Model: a framework for distributing AI-generated prosperity through automation dividends, AI-windfall taxation and a dynamic VAT linked to technological deflation. Many argue it’s a more structurally serious response than the original Abundance.
Now in the hotel suite, when the pushback comes about whether systems and governments would actually adapt at the pace he describes, and if society is ready for this shift. Diamandis’ response is not to dismiss the concern but to hold it honestly. “We’ve depended upon the idea of going to work for somebody as the mechanism of stability,” he unpacks. “I think there’s going to be a lot of turbulence as we transition forward and restructure people’s beliefs and expectations of how the world should work.”
For him, the real challenge is not technological change itself but the rewriting of the social contract around it. Schools were built to prepare people for industrial work. Careers were built around the assumption of long-term employment. Governments were designed to protect institutions and preserve stability. Diamandis believes all of that is now under pressure. In the world he sees coming, people will need to think more like creators than employees, more like entrepreneurs than cogs in a system.
The obvious pushback is that wealth disparity may widen before it narrows, and that the people who control institutions, capital and power are unlikely to surrender them easily. That abundance may still arrive unevenly. Diamandis is realistic about that resistance. “There’s going to be a lot of political pressure to keep the existing institutions in control,” he agrees, “because they fund politicians, they fund campaigns.” But he believes the pressure is ultimately futile. Industries don’t stay static simply because the incumbents want them to. Taxi companies didn’t stop ride-sharing. Universities haven’t stopped online learning. Traditional media hasn’t stopped even in the face of AI-generated content. In every case, the systems resisted, then adapted. That is what will happen again, according to Diamandis. Governments may move slowly and institutions may protect themselves. But eventually they will have to bend to the economic logic of technologies that are cheaper, faster, and more effective than what came before.
“No company in any industry is going to look the same five years from now,” he says. “Will the world be better off? I believe so.”
The Price Curve is the Point
Diamandis expands the argument. The first people to own an automobile were wealthy. The first to fly commercially were wealthy. The first to carry a mobile phone were wealthy. In each case, what began as expensive, specialist and inaccessible eventually became ordinary. He believes AI, longevity and biological enhancement will follow the same trajectory. The wealthy accessing these technologies first is not, in his view, a sign that the system is broken. It’s how the system works. “The rich get it first,” he says. “That’s always the case. But then it gets democratised.”
The evidence he points to is grounded in observable history. The cost of sequencing the human genome fell from roughly US$100 million in 2001 to under US$1,000 within two decades, at a rate that outpaced Moore’s Law by a factor of three. The mRNA vaccines deployed globally against Covid-19 were in strict biological terms, a form of gene therapy. Designed for a billion people, they cost approximately one to two dollars per dose. The same category of therapy, developed for a small number of patients with a rare genetic condition, costs in the region of US$1 million per dose. “When we get to something that works at scale,” Diamandis explains, “it’ll be cheap and accessible for everybody.”
The same logic applies to AI. “We’re unleashing intelligence-as-a-service,” he continues. “I would never have imagined that the most powerful technology in the world, these large language models, would be available to billions of people for free.” Diamandis is firm on the notion that technologies that begin as elite products rarely stay that way for long. They move down the price curve, become more accessible, and eventually reshape expectations entirely. Once people experience something that is cheaper, faster, more personalised or more effective, they do not willingly return to what came before.
Admittedly, it’s this relentless optimism that makes Diamandis unusually persuasive, even to those who remain skeptical. He has spent much of his career making bets on technologies that sounded fringe, elite or implausible, only to watch them become mainstream. XPRIZE did it with private space travel. AI is doing it now with intelligence itself. Longevity, he believes, is next. The same forces now driving AI forward—vast capital, fierce competition and a race for dominance between companies and countries—are increasingly shaping health and the luxury of life too. The question in his view is no longer whether these technologies will advance, but how quickly.
“There is no stopping this,” Diamandis says. “The only question is how do you participate in it?”
Is Longevity the Last Great Luxury?
In Asia, where populations are ageing rapidly and life expectancy is already among the highest in the world, the question is becoming less about how long people live and more about how well they live. Singapore is a case in point. The average lifespan here is 83. The average health span (the years lived in genuine good health) is 73. A decade lost to decline.
This is exactly Diamandis’ point. For him, longevity is not about extending the final years of life at any cost. It’s about collapsing the gap between lifespan and health span. That thinking sits behind Fountain Life, the diagnostics company he co-founded with Tony Robbins and physician William Kapp. Whole-body MRIs, AI-enabled coronary scans, genome sequencing and epigenetic testing are expensive today, but he believes they will not stay that way. Already, the company has found undetected cancers in 2% of patients, aneurysms in another 2%, and pre-diabetes in as many as half of those screened.
“If you find disease at stage one, like a cancer, you’ve got a 99% chance of curing yourself,” Diamandis explains. “If you don’t look and you wait till stage four, your chances are vastly diminished.” In his view, that changes the conversation entirely. Early diagnostics stop looking like a luxury product and start looking like one of the highest-return investments a person can make. The same thinking underpins his US$101 million XPRIZE Healthspan, launched in 2023 and backed by Lululemon founder Chip Wilson, GSK and Saudi Arabia’s Hevolution Foundation. The competition challenges teams to develop treatments capable of restoring up to 20 years of muscle, cognitive and immune function in adults aged 50 to 80. Diamandis’ shares the prize is not designed to run the definitive trial, but to direct global scientific attention towards a problem that has long been underfunded relative to its human cost.
Luxury has always been built on scarcity. A great timepiece holds its value because the supply is constrained by craft and intention. A grand cru is what it is because the hectares that produce it are finite. The emotional architecture of the market rests on the logic that the most desirable things are not, by definition, available to everyone. What Diamandis is describing is a category of desire that does not obey that logic. Precision health, extended vitality and biological advantage begin as expensive and exclusive. Over time, they move from privilege to expectation.
“Eight billion people all share the same biology,” he says. “When we get to something that works at scale, it’ll be cheap and accessible for everybody.”
Are You a Believer?
As we walk out into the hallway, Diamandis turns to me and asks if I believe him yet.
Part of me does. The science is real. The acceleration is real. There are people alive today because of technologies that didn’t exist a decade ago, and that curve is only steepening. When he describes a world where a child in Lagos has access to the same diagnostic intelligence as a patient at Mayo Clinic, it doesn’t register as utopian. It registers as a matter of sequencing of when, not if.
But then I think about every transformative technology in history that arrived carrying the same promise. That it would level things. That it would open doors. And somehow power has always found a way to build new walls faster than the old ones fall. The question was never whether the tools would be extraordinary. They always are. The question is who controls them, who profits from them, and who gets to decide when everyone else is allowed to catch up.
Diamandis has sat with all of this. He just arrives somewhere different. “Help your citizens, help yourself,” he says. “A positive mindset is one of the biggest indicators for longevity. That doesn’t cost anything.”
Which is either the most democratic thing he’s said all morning, or the most quietly radical. I’m still deciding.
Header image courtesy of Peter Diamandis.