Can steroids combat population collapse? The Enhanced Games wants to find out.

Summary

The Enhanced Games, a new sporting competition explicitly designed to allow performance-enhancing drugs, looks like a publicity stunt for the techno-macho era: Olympic athletes on steroids competing for million-dollar bounties in Las Vegas. But co-founder Aron D’Souza has a 90% gross margin telehealth business in mind, and a pitch to governments struggling with aging populations. Launching in May 2026 with Peter Thiel’s backing, the Games promise $1 million bounties for breaking world records. Former Olympic athletes like sprinter Fred Kerley and swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev have already signed up to compete. The goal isn’t just to smash world records while fans cheer. It’s to build a marketing engine for a longevity industry that D’Souza believes will be worth trillions. “We use sports marketing to sell a human enhancement product,” D’Souza said on a recent episode of Equity. “It’s a telehealth service like Hims or Roman, except we [will] have evidence that the best and fastest athletes in the world use our protocols.” The business model is borrowed from Red Bull – extreme sports as advertisement for the product – but the product isn’t an energy drink. It’s 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 ick factor fades once people see athletes in their 30s and 40s smash world records. He and billionaire co-founder Christian Angermayer have raised “double-digit millions” on this theory and poached executives from the U.S. Olympic Committee, Red Bull, and FIFA to build what D’Souza calls a mission to “upgrade all of humanity.” “I believe that when Fred [Kerley] breaks [Usain Bolt’s] 100-meter world record in Vegas next year, it will be a watershed moment to show that enhanced humans are better than ordinary humans,” he said. Put another way: if Sputnik launched the space age and ChatGPT launched the AI boom, D’Souza thin...