04/12/2026
It is now going viral! Billionaire Sam Altman paid a $10,000 refundable deposit to join the waiting list of a startup that requires participants to be killed so their brains can be preserved, with the goal of one day bringing their minds back to life in a computer.
In March 2018, Sam Altman paid a $10,000 refundable deposit to join the waiting list of a startup called Nectome. The idea is that this could let his mind continue to exist in digital form and live forever.
At that time, around 25 people had already paid to be on this list, and Altman told MIT Technology Review that he believed mind‑digitizing could happen in his lifetime and that he assumed his brain would one day be “uploaded to the cloud.”
Nectome’s method, as described in 2018, involved connecting a living person, under anesthesia and on life support, to a machine that would pump a special chemical embalming solution through the arteries to preserve the brain in extreme detail so it might be scanned and simulated by future technology.
The company said this process was “100 percent fatal” and that the experience would effectively be the same as physician‑assisted su***de, which at the time was legal only for terminally ill patients in a few US states such as California.
In 2018, after the first news reports and criticism, MIT’s Media Lab quickly ended its research agreement with Nectome. It also said it did not support the company’s idea of a service that would preserve brains after death to upload minds. MIT explained that science is not advanced enough to recreate a person’s mind from a preserved brain.
Sam Altman’s $10,000 deposit is still mentioned in recent articles as an example of his early interest in living digitally forever. However, there is no evidence that the project went beyond a waiting list and media attention. It is still seen as a controversial bet on a future technology that does not yet exist. - online report