The Enhanced Games is a new sporting competition explicitly designed to allow performance-enhancing drugs. While it may appear to be a publicity stunt featuring Olympic athletes on steroids competing for million-dollar bounties in Las Vegas, its co-founder Aron D’Souza has a larger business plan in mind. He is building a telehealth business with a 90 percent gross margin and pitching it to governments that are struggling with aging populations.
Backed by Peter Thiel and launching in May 2026, the Games promise one million dollar bounties for breaking world records. Former Olympic athletes like sprinter Fred Kerley and swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev have already signed up to compete. The goal is not just to smash world records for cheering fans, but to build a marketing engine for a longevity industry that D’Souza believes will be worth trillions.
He stated that they use sports marketing to sell a human enhancement product. He described it as a telehealth service similar to Hims or Roman, except they will have evidence that the best and fastest athletes in the world use their protocols. The business model is borrowed from Red Bull, using extreme sports as an advertisement for the product. However, the product is not an energy drink. It is testosterone, growth hormone, or whatever else can keep humans competitive with machines and productive into their 70s and beyond.
While the Games are seen as controversial, D’Souza is betting the public’s discomfort will fade once people see athletes in their 30s and 40s break world records. He and billionaire co-founder Christian Angermayer have raised double-digit millions on this theory. They have also hired executives from the U.S. Olympic Committee, Red Bull, and FIFA to build what D’Souza calls a mission to upgrade all of humanity.
He believes that when Fred Kerley breaks Usain Bolt’s 100-meter world record in Vegas, it will be a watershed moment to show that enhanced humans are better than ordinary humans. In his view, if Sputnik launched the space age and ChatGPT launched the AI boom, a record-breaking sprint on performance enhancers could launch the human enhancement era and unlock a similar flood of investment.
Longevity startups raised 8.5 billion dollars in 2024 as interest in lifespan extension moved from a fringe obsession to a mainstream investment thesis. The appeal spans from billionaires funding anti-aging research to everyday Americans turning to direct-to-consumer health tracking.
D’Souza believes longevity is not just a nice-to-have, but a need-to-have in the face of aging populations and smarter machines. In many parts of the world, falling birth rates have put major global economies on a path toward population collapse. A recent study found fertility rates are declining below the replacement rate almost everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa.
Many countries have used immigration to address the challenges of an aging population, as immigrants usually arrive at a younger working age, fill labor gaps, and tend to have more children. But mass migration has triggered a political backlash in Europe and the U.S., where right-wing parties have gained ground by stoking fears about immigration and national identity. Immigration has been a central issue of Donald Trump’s presidency, and D’Souza reckons the issue could push far-right leaders in countries like Germany, France, and the U.K. into power.
He stated that if you are against mass immigration, you end up with a demographic model that looks like Japan. Japan’s average age of 49.8 years makes it one of the oldest populations in the world. He asked how you reconcile the desire for economic growth with an anti-immigration modality. He continued that the solution has to be longevity and human enhancement, because there is no other way. He argued we need a young, working, tax-paying population, and that does not stack up with low birth rates.
It is a stark pitch. Rather than embrace immigration or expand social safety nets that might encourage higher birth rates, the proposal is to just enhance humans to work longer. D’Souza dismissed policy alternatives, saying Europe already tried supporting families and it failed to bring birth rates up.
Given this backdrop, the Enhanced Games has some predictable backers, including Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr., through his VC firm 1789 Ventures. D’Souza describes both as obsessive about the demographics of the nation. Thiel has poured money into longevity startups including Retro Biosciences, Unity Biotechnology, and NewLimit, which he co-founded with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.
Of course, many of the Games’ same investors are also betting billions that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, will soon do most jobs better than humans can. This raises the question of why we should bother extending our working years if AGI is coming.
D’Souza described what he called the Sam Altman view of the world, which is that AGI will come, replace all the humans, and then humans become basically a second-class species because there will be a superior species in the machines. He believes the inevitable consequence of that, which he says Altman will not admit, is that humans become irrelevant.
The alternate paradigm D’Souza is proposing is a competition between humans and machines. He stated that machines are getting better in real time, and because of outdated regulations from bodies like the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti Doping Agency, human enhancement is stifled. This means we are not able to upgrade fast enough to compete with the machines. His goal is to ensure that humans can remain competitive with the machines.
The problem with this species-level framing is that not all humans will necessarily get the upgrade. D’Souza says technology diffusion will lead to a sort of trickle-down enhancement. In this model, what is suitable for champion athletes becomes therapy for people in activities like CrossFit, and then becomes suitable for more non-athletes. However, the business model of premium telehealth services marketed through elite athletes points toward a potential reality where the wealthy get enhanced, and everyone else gets older.
When it was suggested that enhancement technologies would likely reach the wealthiest first and that elites might hoard access, D’Souza did not push back. He agreed that it is a potentially pernicious consequence of human enhancement.