If there is one thing that the masters of the tech universe have in common, it is their view that everything is, in essence, a machine that can be tuned for maximum efficiency. The human body is no exception. As the tech bro billionaires enter their late thirties, forties and fifties, it is perhaps no surprise that they have turned their analytical minds to that most middle-aged of obsessions: fitness. But these are not the Mamils (middle-aged men in Lycra) we have come to expect — the titans of tech do it differently. Behold, the routines of the most powerful and wealthy men in the world.
Mark Zuckerberg, 39
MARK ZUCKERBERG / INSTAGRAM
The Facebook founder and Meta boss has turned himself into a fighting machine. Zuckerberg has taken up competitive mixed martial arts and is, uh, very serious about it. As part of his fitness regime, he completed the “Murph challenge”: a gruelling feat that includes a one-mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 press-ups, 300 squats and another one-mile run, all while wearing a weighted vest. He has trained with world-class fighters, entered MMA tournaments and, for a few vapid weeks, agreed to a fight with Elon Musk. Zuck’s transformation from the waify, sun-starved kid of yore came to a screeching halt last month when he tore one of his anterior cruciate ligaments while sparring in preparation for another tournament. He underwent surgery but pledged to get back to fighting, posting a photo of himself in a hospital bed with a clenched fist. And by his estimation he has plenty of fighting years left. He and his wife, Priscilla Chan, fund the Breakthrough prize, which hands $3 million to scientists working on big problems such as longevity. He has said that by the end of this century, it will be “pretty normal” to live past 100.
LAUREN SANCHEZ / INSTAGRAM The most extraordinary bodily transformation has been that of the Amazon boss. Bezos, who turns 60 on January 12, is, for lack of a better word, jacked. The third-richest man in the world beefed up with the help of Wes Okerson, a celebrity trainer whose past clients include Tom Cruise and who mixes heavy weight training with paddleboarding and hill running. Like his fellow techies, Bezos is obsessed with sleep — he is a stickler about getting eight hours — and is devoted to maintaining his bod, rarely skipping a workout. He is also interested in immortality, being one of the chief funders of Altos Labs, the most lavishly funded biotech start-up ever, which aims to commercialise “cellular rejuvenation”. The head of OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, takes his fitness extremely seriously, but isn’t fighting anyone. This includes his board of directors, who recently fired him, then unfired him, and then fired themselves. First thing in the morning he blasts himself with a full-spectrum LED light, which is thought to be good for energy, sleep and metabolism. He prioritises sleep, which he has called “the most important physical factor in productivity”, and tracks it with gadgets. A mentor once said Altman was so irrepressible that “you could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he’d be the king”. Altman, however, is vegetarian. He fasts for up to 15 hours a day, takes metformin — a diabetes drug beloved of techies for its (unproven) capacity to slow ageing — and occasionally does high intensity interval training. The chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, owner of X (formerly Twitter) and founder of Neuralink, the Boring Company and X.ai, his new AI start-up, is perhaps understandably the laggard of the group. He is rather busy sending rockets into space and, in the case of X, running companies into the ground. That said, he does apparently do the occasional bout of mixed martial arts — as evidenced by his almost-fight with Zuckerberg. But by his own admission, he rarely sleeps, works up to 120 hours a week and generally leads a life that few people would relish. After particularly unflattering photos of him looking pale and flabby emerged from a yacht trip off Mykonos in 2022, Musk took drastic action, cutting calories and going on Wegovy, the popular weight loss drug. The billionaire co-founder of X (née Twitter) is the resident Buddha among the tech bros. He can often be seen walking the streets of San Francisco, dressed in black from head to toe with a nose ring and an extremely long goatee. The five-mile walk to Block, his online payments company, seems to be his principal form of exercise. But he was also doing cold-plunge ice baths before they were cool. And they are very “cool” these days: no billionaire worth his salt doesn’t jump into a tub of ice every so often to shiver their knackers off for three minutes. This, apparently, does wonders for one’s nervous system, focus and confidence? Dorsey once said: “Nothing has given me more mental confidence than being able to go straight from room temperature into the cold.” He also surfs. And fasts, often having just one meal at night or even going the whole weekend till Sunday night without a morsel. Bill Gates and Roger Federer GETTY IMAES Not every master of the universe takes life to the extreme. Bill Gates, for example, loves a burger, plays tennis and hits the treadmill most days. His regime is strikingly normal. But then again, he is 68 years old and worth $118 billion — why dunk yourself in an ice bath when maybe you can just pay to clone yourself when the time comes? The same goes for Sundar Pichai, the 51-year-old boss of Google parent Alphabet. Pichai, who grew up in India, seems to go out of his way to be boring, though he sets himself apart in a couple of distinct ways. He starts his day with a cup of tea and, when he can, he gets in a spot of cricket, at which he was rather good as a child.Jeff Bezos, 59
Sam Altman, 38
Elon Musk, 52
Jack Dorsey, 47
The normies
