Who Is Bryan Johnson? All About the Tech Entrepreneur Spending Millions to Live Forever in Netflix’s New Documentary “Don’t Die”

Death is inevitable — but Bryan Johnson doesn't think it should be.

The tech entrepreneur — the subject of Netflix's new documentary Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever — has spent millions of dollars over the past four years implementing the latest discoveries in longevity science to reverse aging and lengthen his lifespan.

The documentary, which premiered on the platform on Jan. 1, chronicles all the algorithm-designed routines, rigid protocols and controversial treatments the millionaire has subjected himself to for what he described to TIME in September 2023 as “the most significant revolution in the history of Homo sapiens.”

Naturally, a quest of this magnitude is costly. After walking away with $300 million from selling his payment-processing company Braintree (which had acquired Venmo) in 2013, he spent a total of $4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint. Johnson, 47, has positioned himself as the program’s test subject, with the goal of reducing the biological age of his vital organs to that of an 18-year-old.

So, who is Bryan Johnson? Here’s everything to know about the tech millionaire featured in Don’t Die — and all the controversial attempts he’s made to live forever.

He’s from Springville, Utah

Johnson was raised in Springfield, Utah, with three brothers and one sister, per Technori. His parents, Richard Johnson and Ellen Huff, divorced when he was young. In Don’t Die, Huff described her son as a “problem solver” and said that he would often not eat lunch to help the family save money. She added, “He was always coming up with something to help the family.

Richard struggled with drugs and was arrested when Johnson was 22. The patriarch said in the documentary that his son visited him in jail and encouraged him to get help.

After serving a Mormon mission in Ecuador, Johnson attended Brigham Young University and then enrolled at the University of Chicago for business school.

He left The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 2013

The tech millionaire grew up in the Mormon church. When he was 24, Johnson said he fell into a deep depression that lasted 10 years and led to him questioning the very religion that his life was based around.

“It was torture,” he said during an August 2023 interview on The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett. “When you’re raised Mormon, it is your singular reality and identity of existence. It’s everything you are as a human.”

After selling his company in 2013, Johnson left the church and divorced his first wife, per TIME.

He has three kids

Johnson has three children from his first marriage: two boys and a girl. At the time of his 2023 interview with TIME, his older son was serving a mission for the Mormon Church and his teenage daughter was living with her mother. Johnson's younger son, Talmage Johnson, also left the church and moved to Los Angeles to spend his senior year of high school with his dad.

Talmage also commits to the Blueprint diet and lifestyle. He told TIME that “the idea of having pizza is more painful than pleasurable for me.”

Don’t Die documents Johnson’s relationship with his younger son and seeing him off to college.

He spends $2 million a year trying to live forever

During a January 2023 interview with Bloomberg, Johnson estimated that he spends roughly $2 million annually on his immortal crusade. Some of those expenses include a personal health team of 30 doctors and experts who monitor his organs and bodily functions, weekly skin care treatments to repair sun damage and experimenting with other — occasionally controversial — unregulated avenues to extend lifespan.

Don’t Die followed Johnson to Próspera, a for-profit city off the coast of Honduras that’s known for its experimental medical facilities, per The New York Times. There, he participated in a round of follistatin gene therapy, which he claimed slowed down his speed of aging so that he celebrates his birthday every 19 months instead of 12. (Follistatin gene therapy is not approved by the FDA.)

He follows a rigid routine that includes taking 54 pills a day

To put his body in its “ideal state,” Johnson told Don’t Die filmmakers that he follows a strict daily routine that includes over a hundred different practices. Those practices include taking 54 pills throughout the day, eating a few pounds of vegetables, having dinner at 11 a.m., an hour-long workout and going to bed at 8:30 p.m. every night.

"We’ve basically crawled every scientific publication on healthspan and lifespan — something like 2,000 publications,” he told The Guardian in September 2023. “And we take each study, apply a number of criteria to it — some are animal models, so we make that discernment — and then we prioritize.”

In Don’t Die, he also said he measures his weight, body temperature and heart rate daily and undergoes other regular tests and protocols to help him “achieve the lowest possible biological age.” 

He swapped blood with his son and his dad

In May 2023, Johnson announced on Instagram that he, Talmage and Richard completed the “world’s first multi-generational plasma exchange.” Don’t Die filmmakers followed the family through this process, which the Johnsons believed would help reduce age-related brain decline in the two older Johnson men per Fortune.

Though the entrepreneur posted on X in July 2023 that he was “discontinuing” the young plasma exchange from his son because his team detected no benefits, he later claimed that his blood helped reduce his 70-year-old father’s age by 25 years.

“The older we get, the faster we age,” he captioned a November 2023 Instagram photo of his dad receiving the treatment. “After receiving 1 L of my plasma, my father is now aging at the rate of a 46 year old. Previously, he was aging at the rate of a 71 year old. I am my dad’s blood boy.”

His ex-fiancée sued him for leaving her after she was diagnosed with breast cancer

Johnson was accused of leaving his ex-fiancée Taryn Southern after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In an October 2021 lawsuit, the content creator said she met the tech millionaire in 2016 and that during their whirlwind romance, he promised to "take care of her, financially and medically, for the rest of her life.” Southern also claimed he pressured her to give up her career and devote her time to him.

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019, she was “financially dependent” on Johnson. Her attorneys claimed that he demanded that she move out after she started undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Because Southern had signed an employment contract with one of the entrepreneur’s companies in 2017, the case was moved to arbitration, where the arbitrator ruled in Johnson’s favor.

Southern was held responsible for his $584,199 legal bill and the case was dismissed that December, per Vanity Fair.

He’s shared that some of his experiments haven’t worked

Not all of Johnson’s attempts to reverse the clock have worked. The tech entrepreneur posted a series of photos on Instagram in November 2024 that showed his face swollen almost to the point of unrecognition. He wrote in the caption that he injected fat into his face from a donor to restore the facial volume he lost from getting too lean — which he claimed made people think he “was on the brink of death.”

Johnson said that immediately after the injections, his face “began to blow up” to the point where he couldn’t see. However, his face returned to normal a week later.

“Building a product is one thing,” he wrote, “being the product is a whole different thing."

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