Fame! I gonna live forever! Baby, remember my name!

Ask me when the time comes, but I really have no desire to live forever.

Sure, I'd like to be around long enough to see how a few things turn out (including, I must admit, my own life). And I'm not in any hurry to exit stage left, thank you. 

But I'm pretty sure there'll come a point when I'm worn out, slowed down, and fed up. And when that time comes, I hope that I'll bow out gracefully - or with as much grace as someone who's worn out, slowed down, and fed up can muster. 

This is, of course, just me, and I'm sure there are many folks out there who'll be fighting loose and wobbly tooth, and split and pitted nail, to stay above ground.

Not surprisingly, some of them are billionaires.

After all, you can't take it with you, and if you have a lot of "it" burning a hole in your pocket, I can see how you might want to hang around and keep spending. Imagine how immense your bucket list would be if you had near-infinite money?

Why wouldn't one of those bucket list items be "live forever?" Why wouldn't you want to spend some of your near-infinite money on the secret sauce, the magic elixir, the DNA manipulation that would help you stay alive?

Not surprisingly, some of these billionaires are investing some of their loot piles in biotechs looking for a science-based version of the Fountain of Youth. 

Jeff Bezos put some of his enormous stack o' chips on Altos Lab, "an anti-aging startup," where he's in the excellent company of fellow multi-multi-multi-billionaire Larry Ellison of Oracle fame. 

Altos, of course, is not explicitly focused on keeping Bezos and Ellison alive so they can compare loot piles. (Bezos has a few more bucks than Ellison, but they both have well over $100 billion. Remember when we used to think that being a billionaire put you in the wealthy category? Good times!)

They are looking for ways to improve cellular health and resilience through a process called cellular rejuvenation. The group's goals are to reverse the occurrence of injury, disabilities and age-related diseases so people can live longer and healthier lives. (Source: Yahoo)

Yay to reversing the ravages of injury, disabilities, and age, but the suspicion is that Ellison and Bezos are laser-beaming on the age-related end of things, especially for Ellison, who's 79. (Comparatively, at 59, Bezos is a fine broth of a lad.)

Bezos is hedging his live-forever investments by joining Peter Thiel in betting on Unity Biotechnology. 

The company's mission is to create "transformative medicines to slow, halt or reverse diseases of aging," according to the company's website. The company's initial focus is on therapeutic remedies for age-related neurological conditions and various ophthalmologic diseases.

As billionaires go, Thiel is pretty meh, estimated to be worth a paltry $10-ish B. Still, he's made some smart money plays, so his money sense is pretty good.

Ellison also has a couple of side bets.

OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman has put some money in Retro Biosciences, which is mucking around with rejuvenating T cells. (An aside: I misread Sam Altman as Sam Bankman Fried.)

There are also opportunities for OpenAI's ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) platforms to find novel ways to combat aging, such as discovering new drug combinations or exciting therapies that can prevent age-related diseases.

No one with be shocked to find that Mark Zuckerberg is also in the hunt. Alongside Priscilla Chan (Zuck's wife) and Sergey Brin, he helps fund the Breakthrough Prize which awards "scientific advances, including anti-aging developments.

Bezos and Zuckerberg aren't waiting for some breakthrough to keep them going. Both of them are avid fitness buffs, and Zuckerberg was in some recent back-and-forth with Elon Musk that at one point looked like it was going result in a cage match between the two guys.

Curiously, Musk - who's worth almost as much as these other guys combined - isn't investing in anti-aging companies:

Musk, an outlier in the billionaires-funding-aging club, has said in interviews on the subject, "I certainly would like to maintain health for a longer period of time. But I am not afraid of dying. I think it would come as a relief."

I can assure Elon Musk that it would come as a relief to many of us. 

Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive.