CEOs often entertain wealthy clients, but James Arrowood’s conversations with them are about life, death, and what comes next. As CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Scottsdale, Arizona Focused on cryogenics– The practice of freezing human corpses, heads, and even pets in the hope that future generations will do so Revive them one dayHe oversees a membership of about 1,600 people who pay upwards of $100 a month, plus roughly $220,000 for full-body preservation or $80,000 for nerve preservation (for head-freezing only), a group he says includes about 10 percent of the 50 richest people in the world.
“I talk to billionaires when they die,” he told the Observer. “None of them cares about their bank balance, they don’t even know how much money they have… It’s about relationships, it’s about their legacy.”
The quest to escape death is particularly popular in Silicon Valley, where billions have been poured into anti-aging and life-extension startups. Alcor, founded by engineer Fred Chamberlain and his wife, Linda, in 1972, promotes itself as the “OG” of the longevity business, according to Arrowwood, a former lawyer who started as outside general counsel before becoming CEO in 2022. “There’s a pool of big money starting stealth-mode companies in the cryogenic space,” he said. “They’re pumping in tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars now — and they’re all lagging behind.”
Here’s how Operation Alcor works: When a member dies, the organization’s Deployment and Recovery Team (DART) — which Arrowood has expanded to include retired Special Forces members — moves quickly to transport the body to its facility in Arizona. There, patients are injected with a cryoprotectant solution, cooled in liquid nitrogen and stored in large Dewar vats under constant monitoring. Alcor currently has 250 preserved patients, including founder Fred Chamberlain, who was cryopreserved in 2012.
Tech founders, investors and celebrities have agreed with this idea. Peter Thiel is He is said to be a member of Alcoras it is Inventor Ray Kurzweil and Producer Steve Aoki. User service fees accounted for nearly 40 percent of Alcor’s $4 million in revenue in 2024, according to its most recent tax filings, with the rest coming from donations and investment income.
Whether this money is being spent well is a matter of intense debate. “I can count on one hand the number of neuroscientists who think this whole concept is dangerous,” Michael Hendricks, an associate professor of neurobiology at McGill University, told Observer. “I think what Alcor is tapping into is: There’s a very good market for seemingly technological magic beans that you can sell to rich people.”
No human has been revived from cryopreservation. James Bedford, the first person to be cryogenically frozen in 1967, remains in Alcor’s care after being transferred there in the 1980s. Al-Aroud admits that repatriating people is an ambitious goal and not the organization’s primary mission. “Some people hope this is the outcome, but this is the lottery ticket,” he said. Instead, it focuses on applications such as keeping donated organs, such as kidneys, viable longer. “This is what I’m trying to achieve before I die.”
Who are the members of the core?
Affluent individuals represent approximately 20 percent of Alcor’s membership. The other 80 percent is made up of scientists, artists and athletes, Arrowood said, and noted that many of them fund their arrangements by naming Alcor as a beneficiary of their life insurance policies. He is now focusing on reaching more women, who make up only about a third of members, a gap he attributes to men who display more selfish motives.
Arrowood is a member himself, and calls himself “Neurotic”, because he chooses to keep only his head. Every Alcor Board Member and Executive Director is also registered. “They want to motivate people by preserving it.”
The interest of the tech elite is part of a broader boom in long-term investing. She has very rich personalities It has pumped an estimated $5 billion into this sector over the past 25 yearsThis is according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has backed Retro Biosciences, which aims to extend human lifespan by a decade, while Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has funded Altos Labs, a biotech company focused on anti-aging. Thiel donated millions to the Methuselah Foundation.
Meanwhile, Alcor has competition in the field of cryogenics itself. The Cryonics Institute in Michigan has more than 2,000 members worldwide. New entrants include Berlin-based Tomorrow Bio and San Francisco-based Until Labs, which last year raised €5 million ($5.8 million) and $58 million, respectively, the latter in a round led by Thiel Founders Fund.
Arrowood says Alcor’s long history gives it an advantage that money alone can’t buy. The nonprofit, unlike more recent projects, has decades of data on what bodies look like after long-term cryopreservation. “They don’t own it, they can’t buy it,” he said of potential competitors, some of whom he claimed had tried to take over Alcor — a non-startup given its nonprofit status.
He also warns that the emotional and logistical realities of a freeze can surprise executives who only see the financial opportunity. “There was a mother crying over her baby, and you have 20 minutes to get that body,” Arrowood said. “If you were a businessman, you wouldn’t be dealing with this.”
For him, this power is just part of the job. His days can include anything from calling a billionaire client to touring underground mines in Europe, where Alcor – which recently launched a sister operation in Canada – is looking to expand further. “It’s the strangest job on earth,” he said.
