This millionaire wants to live 120 years and work for a long time: ‘I am in favor of the pension initiative’

The reality is that rich people live up to ten years longer than poor people. Fiction is that some Hollywood productions go so far as to consider lives as the main currency of the future.

In ‘In Time’ (2011) people trade with years of life. The upper class can live for thousands of years, while the poorest have only a few hours or minutes left. And in ‘Paradise’ (2023) the poor sell their lives to the rich, who can therefore buy many extra healthy years.

These are both just science fiction films, but there is a lot of research being done in this direction in the real world as well. Longevity is the name of the billion-dollar market in which the super-rich worldwide invest. The longevity sector is also growing in Switzerland. One of the biggest supporters in this country is Basel-based multimillionaire Tobias Reichmuth. “My goal is to live to be 120 years old,” he said in an interview with Watson.

Watson meets Reichmuth at his company’s headquarters in Zug train station. He has just arrived in his Tesla from St. Moritz, where he is currently having a house built. Reichmuth is known as one of the 300 richest Swiss (balance sheet). He made his fortune, estimated at 150 million francs, as the founder and co-founder of several companies.

Including from Crypto Finance, an asset manager for crypto asset funds, which he sold to the German stock exchange in 2021. But also as founder of Susi Partners AG, a fund manager that manages institutional capital worth around two billion francs that is invested in sustainable energy infrastructure. He is probably known to a wider audience as an investor in the Swiss program “The Lions’ Den”.

His latest project, which he promises will be “The Next Big Thing,” has attracted less attention: longevity. Reichmuth has many plans for Switzerland. Not only is he working with a lot of time and money to establish his own five start-ups in this field, he also wants to develop Switzerland into an international “Longevity Valley” along the lines of the “Crypto Valley”. The most prominent figures from the longevity bubble gather in Gstaad every September to present their products to international investors. The event was founded by Tobias Reichmuth, among others. But where does this interest come from?

“Growing old is not an inevitable evil, but a disease. And you can do something about diseases,” he says. Tobias Reichmuth is not a fan of getting older, but he tries to stop it: “According to my passport I am 45 years old, but biologically my body is 38 years old and in my head I am 30 years old.” He is working to rejuvenate his body to 35 years old – without any surgical intervention. He describes Botox or facelifts as “negligent.”

Reichmuth is concerned with “extending his healthy years of life”. Because: “The disease of old age brings with it other symptomatic diseases, such as cancer, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.” He wanted to prevent that. The millionaire believes in scientific progress: “Researchers have discovered that we age because something goes wrong with cell division. Every day our cells divide millions of times. If they copied each other perfectly, we wouldn’t age, we wouldn’t have wrinkles and we wouldn’t get age-related diseases.”

Reprogramming cell rejuvenation will ultimately solve this ‘problem’. Reichmuth says: “We will be able to slow down, even reverse aging, to the point of rejuvenation. This isn’t science fiction, it’s science.” His goal is “120 years of healthy living”. And how does he want to achieve that?

Reichmuth focuses on a mix between a healthy lifestyle and new nutritional supplements. That is also its business model. His first clinic called Ayun will open in June and a whole chain is planned. People should be able to do genetic and various other tests there. Based on the results, a personal intervention and nutritional strategy is drawn up together with doctors and coaches. You can then undergo various personalized therapies on site, such as red light or cryotherapy. The goal is for clients to come to the Ayun Clinic once a week, Reichmuth says. “It will be a kind of gym for longevity.” This costs between 190 and 700 francs per month.

In addition to therapy and medical care, there is also a choice of suitable nutritional supplements. For this purpose, Reichmuth’s incubator Maximon founded the company Avea. The “Longevity Bundle,” an “all-in-one nutritional supplement for longevity,” is available on the website. For about 200 francs per month. Tobias Reichmuth already lives the way he wants future customers to live. He takes about 11 pills a day. But he’s not as extreme as the longevity industry’s best-known and most controversial luminary, Bryan Johnson.

The American Johnson has often made the news. He has set himself the goal of living forever. To achieve this, he lives without compromise and spends two million dollars a year. Every day looks the same to him. He only eats solid food until noon, takes more than 100 pills a day and does various therapies and workouts every day. Tobias Reichmuth, who knows the American personally through the Gstaad conference, describes him as “thoughtful, but extreme.”

Apart from the extreme lifestyle, only the richest 10,000 people in the world have been able to afford extensive treatments for a longer life. However, Reichmuth’s offering should be accessible to a wider audience. “Longevity is not just reserved for the super-rich. Our prices are in the mid-range and in the long term it will become even more affordable,” he says. But anything innovative and new will cost a little more initially.

But the entrepreneur is not only interested in scientific progress, he also wants to make money from it. “Together with other donors, 100 million francs will be invested over the next four years,” he says. His goal is not to become a billionaire – although he has nothing against it – but to “enable people to live healthily for many years to come.” And what should they do with this time?

Tobias Reichmuth publicly supports the Young Liberals’ pension initiative, which will be voted on on March 3. “Life expectancy is constantly increasing. You are not doing yourself any favors by retiring early. Those who do this run a great risk of becoming bored or lonely as they get older. This can have serious consequences for your health,” says Reichmuth. As long as you work, you stay fit. It is clear to him that the “system needs to be reconsidered”. People should be given the opportunity to reinvent themselves, even at an older age.

The millionaire has some ideas for this. He proposes that employees should be given a year every ten years to further their education. As a qualified start-up founder, he is also in favor of providing access to studies to anyone who wants it but cannot afford it. He would therefore find an inheritance tax that taxes inheritances at 50 percent interesting.

“I think a high inheritance tax is good if it is earmarked, that is, invested exclusively in education and start-up financing, and can be paid over a longer period so that family businesses are not destroyed.” According to Reichmuth, good entrepreneurs could pay the tax with their business activities for about ten years. “Otherwise, it would be better if you put your company in more capable hands. In this way, equal opportunities, innovation and Switzerland as a business location could be promoted.”

Tobias Reichmuth is rich and convinced of his visions. If everything goes the way he wants, he will have plenty of time to put this into practice. Unless the future thwarts his plans, as the movie “In Time” states: “The mind can become exhausted even when the body is not.”