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LISBON, PORTUGAL - NOVEMBER 06: Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel, OS Fund and Braintree delivers remarks during the opening night of Web Summit in Altice Arena on November 06, 2017 in Lisbon, Portugal. Web Summit (originally Dublin Web Summit) is a technology conference held annually since 2009. The company was founded by Paddy Cosgrave, David Kelly and Daire Hickey. The topic of the conference is centered on internet technology and attendees range from Fortune 500 companies to smaller tech companies. This contains a mix of CEOs and founders of tech start ups together with a range of people from across the global technology industry, as well as related industries. This year's edition, starting on November 06, is the second to be held in Lisbon and will congregate almost 60,000 participants. (Photo by Horacio Villalobos - Corbis/Getty Images)
For years, tech CEO Bryan Johnson has spent millions of dollars of his vast wealth on finding the key to “anti-aging.”
The 48-year-old has undergone several procedures, including blood transfusions from his teenage son, Talmage, in search of reverse aging and finding what he considers his ideal biological age.
“The body delivers a certain configuration at age 18,” Johnson told Bloomberg at the start of the experiment. “This really is an impassioned approach to achieve age 18 everywhere.”
As we all know, however, there is no fountain of youth, and you cannot cheat Father Time. Earlier this year, Johnson released a list of major findings from his experiment that essentially equated to “eat healthy and work out.”
Now, after years of trying to reverse aging, he’s made another revelation.
Bryan Johnson Reveals He Has Incurable Autoimmune Disease
In his quest to “defeat death,” as he called it, it turns out that Johnson has actually made himself more unhealthy than he had been prior to the start of the experiment.
Johnson recently took to X and revealed that he has an incurable disease called autoimmune gastritis, which causes the immune system to mistakenly attack the healthy cells in his stomach lining.
Bad news #1:
I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself.
Bad news #2:
2–5% of people have this, too. Likely more, because it hides.
Good news:
I’m going to try and solve it. Will share all.
As a kid, I ate sugar cereal, drank sugary soda, and gobbled down… pic.twitter.com/EbJ8a916uS
— Bryan Johnson (@bryan_johnson) June 30, 2026
“I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself,” Johnson said in the post. “…I just discovered it in May. I’m unsure how long I’ve had it. AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk. When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects”
But what type of scientist would Johnson be if he simply quit when things got difficult? Instead, Johnson is searching for ways to reverse the effects of the disease.
“My team and I are going to try and solve my AIG,” Johnson continued. “…Modern medicine has normalized too many conditions that erode our health, function, and comfort, shrinking the goal to monitoring and management while a cure is rarely even attempted. Most of these verdicts were handed down decades ago, in an era that predates nearly all of our current tech and science, and they have gone largely unchallenged. We want to change that.”
On the one hand, you have to commend Johnson for trying. And there’s a chance his research ends up helping people in the future, perhaps even many people.
But on the other hand, you do have to wonder at what point, if any, he realizes that some things just can’t be fixed with technology.