Billionaires, the richest and most powerful people in the world. There are said to be only 1,400 of them, but who are they? Most are elusive figures, living their lives behind closed doors.
So what does unlimited wealth do to the human mind? What do you do after you've got the fast cars you need? yachts and the private jets. These are the entrepreneurs and visionaries that can change our world with their big dreams. All entrepreneurs enjoy dreaming and thinking what could be.
People are shocked, they're afraid of being immortal. Are we still on track to land on the moon by 2015? We've gained intimate access to three of these extraordinary characters.
Our aim? To understand what makes them tick, to understand what makes them special, and to understand... How to be a billionaire.
Meet Naveen Jain. Oh hello, how are you? So, I'm gonna show you some of the cool stuff here.
Stuff from space. Probably have the largest collection of meteorites in private hands and probably probably most museums and this is something that I like to share with everybody and the reason I'm sharing with you is because I want people who can't afford to have them to be able to see what they are like. I want them to be able to touch them and people to feel that same thing that I feel having these meteorites in my hand.
This is really nice beast from the moon. So imagine you're holding in your hand a piece of moon. I mean that is just unbelievable.
So people talk about, you know, Honey, I'll take you to the moon. I brought the moon to you. You, imagine that.
This particular meteorite fell last year in California. And I was watching the TV and I saw this woman holding this meteorite. And I contacted her and I somehow convinced her that it's in much better hands.
hand with me than with her because I think it could pay for her kid's college education, which is how I have it. Here's another meteorite that actually hit a woman minding her own business and this thing from the sky fell through the roof and hit her thigh. This meteorite would be less valuable, but for the fact that it actually hit a human being on earth and it's just really fascinating. Naveen has a seemingly never-ending collection of rocks from outer space. space.
He said they were worth over $9 million, a drop in the ocean for a man with a personal wealth estimated at $2.2 billion. Look, a beautiful burnt rock. But his fascination with space extends beyond his meteorite collection. Moon Express? Thank you.
32-year-old Russian billionaire Dmitry Itzkov made his fortune through an online media empire. Now he's the story as he tries to drive forward one of the most audacious ideas imaginable. Thank you for your vision. Thank you so much. I don't think you're crazy.
I read the articles. I don't think you're crazy. I think you've got a vision.
I think we can help you achieve that vision. Thanks. Thanks, David.
He and his team have taken over a whole floor of an Upper West Side hotel in New York. Final preparations are taking place for his controversial Global Future 2045 Congress. The first meeting with Dimitri is a brief encounter on the street. So what's the point of the Congress? What are you trying to achieve?
It's a natural process for any initiative to draw the attention of the media and to draw... additional finances to the concrete project. So obviously, it will be, those will be next natural steps to get additional money on board, to get media, to get more supported journalists on board.
How is it? funded. How? By myself. How much money have you put into this so far?
Three million dollars by the moment. If I want the whole vision to move forward rapidly, I need somebody else, but with my personal resources, it will continue going on. Dimitri is caught up in a whirlwind of TV and press interviews.
He's trying to convince the world that this project is more than a rich man's pipe dream. Tell us about the 2045 initiative. What are you seeking to accomplish here?
What we're trying to accomplish is to create the foundation for the future evolution of human beings and to give people the chance for... I would say for the second life. Dimitri is happy to talk about the project, but he's more guarded when asked about himself.
You haven't spoken a lot about your personal life, right? Something you prefer not to discuss? There's just nothing in my personal life. Nothing is going on there. What do you mean?
From dawn to dusk, I'm just working and working and traveling, flying and meeting people. After a day of non-stop interviews and networking, Dmitry finally retires to his modest hotel room. Time to get to grips with his dream. So, Dmitry, where did the idea for the Avatar project come from?
The real effect on my personality, which led me to the 2045 Initiative, was about my spiritual crisis. I just, when I was just... At 25, I understood that I just didn't need that extra luxury that I could have.
I just realized that the more I live, the more I just spend my time doing something which won't lead me to the satisfaction of the future. You know, to be immortal, to have the option to live forever, to have the body which is not limited with all this biology, this is the real freedom. It's interesting, you know. First of all, it's completely scientific. You know, no esoterics, no mystics.
It's a scientific avatar. But in parallel, the whole motivation is spiritual. He has a detailed roadmap and even a political party to help drive through his dream.
It's a 35-year plan for human evolution that starts with the development of human-like robots or avatars, controlled remotely through brain-computer interface. This, he hopes, will develop to another stage with the full brain transplant, and he plans to eventually take us to a stage where uploading the human consciousness will be possible. The ultimate end goal is to exist as immortal holograms.
But with science still unable to explain what consciousness actually is, his plan of downloading it to a machine is ambitious to say the least. Michael Birch used to be a computer programmer in his bedroom in Chesson, Hertfordshire. Now he's living the dream in San Francisco.
You know it's an unusual circumstance to suddenly make a lot of money. Took me about three years to get used to it. I When you're not from that background, you're not brought up wealthy, and then you suddenly do have access to wealth. It's a hard adjustment, and it's hard for anyone to feel sorry for you, so you can't really speak to people about that. You should be able to spend money how you like, but you're nonetheless always a little conscientious of how it can appear to others.
And that's particularly true in San Francisco. If you go to LA, it's almost the opposite. But even if you haven't got any money, you want to appear as though you do have a lot of money. San Francisco is sometimes difficult to tell between a billionaire and a bum. My wife and I had a lot of discussions after we sold the business about what we should do with our lives and we wanted to do anything that we felt was going to kind of bring us happiness.
And it's great to take vacation especially with the family but when the kids were in school I'm kind of tied to one place. I can't just sit at home reading all day or I need to be out with people doing things, meeting people, thinking of ideas. In 2005, Michael and his wife Xochitl launched Bebo, a social networking site popular with teenagers. At its height, it was outstripping Facebook and MySpace with over 100 million global users. But on the 13th of March 2008, their lives changed forever.
Internet giant AOL bought the site at the peak of the dot-com bubble for a staggering $850 million. in cash. Michael, is it okay if Stephen shows the reporter around the battery today? Yeah, I think that's okay. Are you looking a little naughty today?
Yes. It's hard to feel that you deserve to ever make a huge amount of money in some ways. I mean, I don't think it's entirely...
There's always an element of luck, but I think we did work to get it. Yes. But you still feel a certain responsibility as to... Like, we don't want to lose it or waste it. We left England 12 years ago now, and the one thing Michael said he missed most were the pubs.
So this is what we did. We brought a pub into our home. We use this as kind of an entertaining space when we have friends over. We sometimes have pickled eggs.
eggs and yards of ale, just to make it feel really English. And then we got Guinness and London Pride on tap, which was the most important element of it. The pub, in a way, is kind of the original social network, so it was, in some ways, a logical follow-on. At least that's what we told ourselves from doing an online social network to doing a real-world one.
But we enjoy kind of curating those social interactions, experiences, so the bar is a kind of good way of doing that. The most enjoyable period of the kind of Bebo experiences you like was early on, when it was just a handful of people in an office coding away, building something that was growing quickly. It was really exciting. And then as it got bigger, it just stopped being as much fun. That's a good point.
It's all right, isn't it? There's a future career ahead of me. I know.
And then we hit problems where we were no longer growing. We were getting beaten by Facebook. So that was kind of a tough period, I think. And it became... It became evident that it was time to sell.
And I wouldn't say that was that enjoyable either. It was not the best year of my life by any means. I mean, Devon being born was an absolute highlight.
Outside of that, it was... The money in itself didn't make us happy. And when we sold, we didn't have to work for AOL.
So we effectively were unemployed the next day and had this big pile of cash. And that was kind of hard to come to terms with. Then we had to really evaluate and say what we're going to do with our lives at this point. And I was the next. next thing for us.
At a compound in Mountain View, California, internet billionaire Naveen Jain is hatching a plan that could make him the world's first trillionaire. Good to see you my friend. So, Naveen, the team is working hard as it usually is. Of course. On the left we have our systems engineering team doing all the mechanical design of the lander.
Yes. And on the right we're doing all the avionics, so micro-miniaturized all of the electronics that goes into landing. Because you can't land without software, so we have our guidance, navigation, and control team working on all the software.
So we're going to land on the moon somewhere around here, close to where the Apollo spacecraft landed. at the equator. How did you pick that area? Well, first of all, it's on the near side, so it's easily accessible from Earth.
The dark area are actually regions of lava plains, so they're not mountainous. Not so long ago, it was the Soviet and America's superpowers that were locked in a race to land on the moon. Now it's Bob and Naveen who are leading the competition to mine precious metals from its surface.
Are we still on track to land on the moon by 2015? We're still on track, Naveen. Initially we thought the mission was going to cost us about 100 million dollars.
Do you think we can bring the cost down to say 50 to 60 million dollars? Yeah, even less. Even less?
I think the first mission will be under 50 and subsequent missions maybe under 40. When would we be able to tell your honey that I want to take you to the moon? Ten years. Ten years.
Not only will it be a honeymoon, but I'm going to be taking my honey to the moon, and I think that'll be the killer. If you can do that, that's real business. can go to the moon for $50 million and the cost comes down to 20 and we're able to bring back the things worth $500 billion.
I don't care what anybody says. That's a great business. Somebody is going to create a trillion dollar industry in space. And we sure hope it's us.
When you tell somebody what you're doing and they don't think it's a crazy idea, then you're thinking too small. So when you walk up to a party and people say, what do you do? Well, I mine the moon.
Well, that's crazy. Well, I'm thinking big. Right.
What do you do? Well, are you writing app for iPhone? Today is the first day of Dimitri's 2045 Congress.
He is hand-picked to be the first to be elected. Some of the world's most open minds, neuroscientists, religious leaders, philosophers and futurists, all gathered to hear him initiate a new era for mankind. In this world of the future, there will be no diseases, no death, no hunger, no wars. But, you know, we don't want to... Look like Borgs from the Star Trek, right?
We want this technology not to spoil our natural biological body. We want the technology to help it to stop suffering, to get rid of death. Thank you.
What were you dreaming when you were a child? Actually, I wanted to be an astronaut. Are you inspired at all by the movie Avatar? No.
In your opening speech, you said that you had a spiritual experience that put you on this path. What was that? You know, spirituality comes to one's life very gradually, you know, and in most cases it comes from the disappointment of the lifestyle which people live.
We don't have to die a physical death. Life... everlasting. How realistic 2045 is depends on this fast rate of technological change. And if we continue to accelerate the way we have been, then the answer is it'll probably be pretty close.
Anything is feasible. The issue here, is it practical? I think that the human ought not to be determined by our genetic makeup.
This conference is convened by someone who wants to become an android. Are there parts of what's going on here that you do not endorse? If the ideas are inappropriate or don't see progress, then presumably they will be dropped from the agenda.
You sometimes think you have to be a little bit crazy to think of such a big idea. It's creativity, it's not craziness. It's, you know, a kind of internal force.
that can change the world. That is not craziness. Dmitry's work isn't just theory and debate. He's plowing his millions into making the first stage of the Avatar project a reality. On Russian television in 2012, he revealed the first prototype android, based...
on himself. It's a fully functional copy of a human. And by the middle of the century, they promise to make a digitization of a human soul to move to an android.
Unsurprisingly, Dmitry wasn't satisfied. So he's now commissioned David Hanson, a leading creator of lifelike androids, to build him a more realistic head that he can showcase at the end of the congress. We just need constantly create some evidence. That will allow people to start believing that the project is real. But let me have a look at it, how lifelike it is.
Because I haven't seen it yet. I think the technology is advanced enough to be sure that it is not a science fiction, it's the reality. It's here, almost here.
So let me thank you for those two beautiful days which we had. Thank you. The Congress is over, but backstage it's obvious not everything has gone according to plan.
And the head that was delivered to Dimitri is not the one he wants to show the world. David, what happened to the head? Oh yeah, it's not finished yet.
Sometimes it takes longer to create something that's truly great. We want to capture the soul of Dimitri. When will it be finished?
Ask him, please. Good question? Yeah, really good question.
I hope soon I would say that it doesn't exist yet I just feel sorry for those people who expected it to see but myself I'm totally okay With the ongoing media circus around him, and the obvious disappointment over the head not being ready, it's clear Dimitri is not in the right frame of mind for more questions. His project and objectives are now clear, but the intriguing figure behind it all is still a mystery. How do you become a billionaire? Perhaps some of the answers can be found by watching Naveen go about his strict daily routine.
I wake up about 4.30 and 5 and between 5 and 5.15 I am working on email, catching up on news, looking at the blog. looking at the different opinions. Because people just don't sleep. I mean, they're working 24-7. Somewhere around the world, people are awake and working.
So you're always constantly being bombarded with requests, information, or just sometimes news. And so in the morning, I wake up and I, you know, take care of my mind. And then after that I work out and that's taking care of my body. And then I do meditate before I go to work so that takes care of my soul.
You know business is like a war. You have to be completely prepared and unless you have mind, body and soul really all ready for it, you just can't fight that battle. I do work very very long hours and I realize there is really no substitute.
I mean it doesn't matter how smart you are, there is just no substitute for hard work. If you want to succeed in life, you have to be absolutely at your best. And the only way to be absolutely at your best is to give it 100% of yourself.
This is my commuter car so I drive it every day to work. Most people buy cars and keep in the garage. I drive them every day. A lot of people assume that entrepreneurs take chances.
Is that true? Not true at all. In fact, entrepreneurs actually hate risk.
Only play the game that you can win. Thank you. Making money is a byproduct of doing things that you really enjoy doing. It is never a goal in itself.
And it's like having sex and orgasm. You have to enjoy the process and not focus on the end goal. People actually who focus on end goal like getting an orgasm never get one.
Following Naveen around on a typical working day, it's obvious that his big ideas attract other big ideas. And his interests stretch way beyond the information e-commerce world in which he's built his fortune. We're in the midst of building this.
We're in the, you know, part of it's being built right here in Seattle. Hopefully by the end of this year it's all going to get put together and we're going to flight test it. So how many people, two per?
Yeah, it's pilot astronaut and you. Okay. We call it the right stuff experience. For Naveen, the billionaire formula is simple. What makes a successful person?
They go out and solve big problems. So you know how to make a billion dollars? You solve a $10 billion problem.
Having already made his billions, he now unashamedly wants to use his business brain to change our world. Let's focus on education, healthcare, energy, shortage of water, shortage of food, and I'm going to tell you how innovation and entrepreneurship can solve each of these problems. Let's look at education.
Imagine if you are able to use a $25 tablet and build some type of a game that's more effective than a private tutor, and it's more addictive than the most addictive video game. Think about it, one day a child is going to come to the mother and say, Mom, can I just play one more hour of math? Because I enjoy it so much.
Naveen has a knack of putting people under his spell, making his mission to solve some of mankind's biggest problems seem plausible in space and on Earth. What if we can build an artificial intelligence system that can be used by a village girl? She'll be able to go door to door and able to diagnose the diseases where there are no health care, there's no hospitals, there are no doctors. These are big ideas that could turn a big profit, but some of them seem a bit far-fetched.
What if we take a 3D printer on the moon, and somebody can go out and send the DNA of a bacteria or a virus, and we print it right there and leave it on the moon, and watch it grow? These ideas, they're a bit out there, aren't they, Naveen? Don't people think you're just a bit mad?
Well, the point is that... The reason they think it's mad, because it's already, they don't know it's already happening. The things that used to be science fiction are now becoming science reality.
Naveen's relentless enthusiasm, obsessive work ethic and unquestionable self-belief are some of the building blocks of how to be a billionaire. And it turns out these qualities were forged in an intriguing childhood. Michael and Sochi live on Billionaire's Row, overlooking San Francisco Bay.
Before they sold their social networking site Bebo for $850 million, life was very different. I felt quite old at the time, but I was 18 when I met Michael, and you're just 19. I was 19. Yeah. We actually worked together at an insurance company, both in kind of salary jobs, but I wanted to do something in the internet.
That space and it happened to coincide with having our first child. So we both kind of gave up work at the same time. He worked from home, you know, creating multiple internet sites, one after the other. And I would then have a baby and then go back. to work to support the family.
And then when I was on maternity leave, I would help out, because I was also a programmer at the time. So I would help Michael with any development work that needed doing. So we started working together, not out of a choice, but out of necessity.
necessity. Looking back, I don't know how we managed to live for three years with two kids and earning no money. I don't know how we did it.
I think Sochi's low point was when she had to get her mum to buy the groceries once. Yes, the grocery store, that was my low point. We paid her mum back soon, so it's okay. I always feel I need to be productive in some way. I mean, just to myself, not necessarily to the world, but if I don't feel some sense of satisfaction from doing something, then I just kind of get bored.
While Bebo lost millions of users under AOL, Michael didn't just sit back and enjoy the trappings of his wealth, as many of us might. He set out to find a replacement project. This is Monkey Inferno. It's a tech startup that we started after selling Bebo. And we employ about 20 people here.
And it's really a vehicle to continue doing what we were doing, just my wife and I, before we did Bebo, which was experimenting with different ideas. I don't only come here to drink, but it does help. We do something called Friday Wine Down.
So Friday around 4, 4.30, everyone starts working, and we go to the bar next door, which is part of the office, and we have guest speakers coming in from outside. And then sometimes we just have people talk internally about a project that we're working on or the way we do things differently at Monkey Inferno to other companies. Yet the bumblebee flies because the bumblebee does not know that it can't fly. We've always been very focused on creating an environment that people would want to come to to work.
We have free drinks, we have free food, we have lunch catered for every day. Any venture that we succeed in with Monkey Inferno everyone has equity in that venture even if they had nothing to do with it. So you're very much encouraged to help every other Employee every other project succeeds because you're all going to be equal benefactors from that success. Michael said that the main motivation wasn't to keep adding to his fortune.
But that hasn't stopped him from investing in over 50 different companies. From tech, to charities, to real world business. Was this his way of keeping busy? Or part of his search for something to fill the void that the sale of Bebo had left in his life? Navin is a father of three who runs four companies and has his own space program.
How do his children live up to that? My oldest, when he was very young, one day he came to me and said, you know what, Dad, I'm going to make more money than you ever did. I actually sat him down and I said, you know, it's surprising you think of success in that way. Success is not about how much money you're going to have.
Success is about how many lives you'll be able to improve. And if you really want to be more successful than I am, go out and improve more people's lives than I'm able to do in my lifetime. And that's what's going to make me proud of you.
And he said, whatever, Dad. I was six years old when Dad started his first company. And at the age of seven, he was taking me on the road with him.
And then when I got a little older, like... 10, 11, he would start randomly throwing me on stage with him in the middle of a talk. He'd be like, hey, why don't you come up and give your thoughts?
And you really had no choice but to get up there and say what you thought. So it was a really interesting way to learn by fire, right? When he's 16, he calls me and says, Dad, I've been meeting lots of my friends who are at MIT and Harvard and Princeton. What if I brought the great mentors that you had for me helping these young kids?
If I could do that around the world. I'll be able to improve more people's life than you did. Would that make you proud?
And I said yes. And guess what? That's when he started Cairo Society. And today it's the world's largest entrepreneurial society.
America needs to reinvent our economy. We need to refocus our entire national efforts on young entrepreneurs. How can we be pioneers that move the world forward? Naveen seems to be nurturing his children on a predetermined path to success. His 16-year-old son Neil is the youngest student ever to attend the Singularity University in the Silicon Valley.
entrepreneurship it's just kind of like a way of life really you can't turn it off and his 19 year old daughter priyanka who is studying at stanford university in california is making her mark in the world of social philanthropy i've spent 18 years of my life taking for granted everything that I have. A great family, parents, mentors, an education, good health. Things that millions and millions of girls around the world live without.
My accomplishments in this world will never be measured by what I do. It will be actually measured by what our children are able to do. Naveen's boys have flown in from California for a rare opportunity to hang out with their dad. Well, there comes my rock star there.
And he's on the phone. Being an entrepreneur is just a full-time job. Seven days a week.
24-7. All right, let's go. I love taking a speedboat out on a full throttle. Sometimes you just got to let the stress out. Let's go.
I just want to give you a heads up that we pushed an updated build. Obviously, it's still, you want them to work hard and sometimes you want them to just slow down a bit, but it's never a balance. He saw me do the same thing. When the three of them get together, the conversation rarely strays from business and finding ways to change.
the world. We're always talking about business. Either he's talking about my business or I'm talking about his business. If you're solving problems, you're doing good in the world. And if you're doing good and you're solving problems in the world, you're going to make a shit ton of money.
If you can solve a problem that affects a billion people, and even if you only got a dollar out of each of those people, you'd still make a billion dollars. Without doubt, the kids are a chip off the old block. But is their entrepreneurialism purely down to their privileged upbringing or is it in their blood? You get transferred. Every six, nine months, that son of a bitch has to go.
He's not taking money. Find somebody who takes money. So we go to the most rural areas, and most of our education was done in places where there are no tables, no chairs, no whiteboard.
You sat on the floor, you wrote on the floor. And despite all that, my sister went on to do a post-doctorate. in applied mathematics. My brother has a PhD in computer science and a PhD in statistics, and I'm the least educated person with a degree in engineering from IIT and MBA.
That is the kind of value system that constantly governs my life. Always looking back and seeing the humble background that you come from and how much you have achieved. Michael Burch has his ambitions grounded in reality. He's not reaching for the stars like Naveen or trying to change the world like Dimitri. Instead, he's spending tens of millions on a project that will make him the landlord of San Francisco's biggest social network.
work. We'd kind of had enough of doing the internet stuff and we wanted to do something which was more of a real-world business and we'd always been into bars. We met in a bar and we built a bar in our home which is one of the most most used rooms in the house.
There's that kind of secret desire to open a pub. How's it going today? Good, how are you doing? Place is looking good.
It's getting there, isn't it? The building has a total of five floors. The top two floors are hotel rooms, 15 hotel rooms.
In the bottom three are club space. It's about 58,000 square feet of floor space altogether. There's a total of five bars, a restaurant, a gym and a spa. It's a pretty sizable project by club standards.
There's a couple of traits that help for an entrepreneur and I think one is just being really stubborn and the other is being really naive. So you're stubborn to think that you can really do it and you're too naive to know that it's probably a really bad idea and risky. Entrepreneurism comes very much from my father. He would come up with a lot of ideas, some of them crazy, some of them not so crazy. But I'd always hear him as a child trying to get these ideas marketed, trying to get people to accept them.
And I wouldn't say I had a great deal of confidence as a child, so I was always amazed that he could do this, pick up the phone and just speak to someone. And I thought, I need to be able to do that when I'm older. I think throughout college, my confidence grew a bit, and then after it continued to grow, and then I just sort of got to that point and forced myself in a position, in some respects, to do that. I always say I was born at the perfect time because I did a degree in physics originally, and I could do the math side of it and pick up computers easily, and I thought, this is it, the Internet's the perfect thing. I was enjoying my life considerably more sitting at home in my bedroom building things and being creative.
than I ever was working at insurance companies as I did before. So I thought, it doesn't really matter that I'm not making money at this. I'm having fun doing it.
And as long as I can find a way of doing that and survive and bring up the family, then I was all for continuing down that path. Much has changed for Michael on his journey as geek programmer from Hertfordshire to internet billionaire of Silicon Valley. He seems compelled to seek out new ventures. Even though his fortune could grant him a life of leisure, is he looking for something that will give him that sense of satisfaction that he got from Bebo before it became a social media giant?
I used to be very laser-focused on one thing, and now it's kind of changed because we're doing quite a few different projects. But at the same time, I kind of enjoy every now and then just focusing on something. and trying to build that. So I started coding again recently. We were camping in the Redwoods in Northern California.
And then I spent the whole weekend, much to my wife's annoyance, sitting under these huge 100 feet high Redwood trees on a camp chair coding for the whole weekend, which I just found immense fun. Although Michael and Naveen are very different people, they share the same single-minded determination. They never set out to become billionaires. They just never gave up pursuing their dreams.
Humility is a sure sign of knowing when somebody has been successful. Because if you still have an iota of arrogance left in you, then you're still trying to prove something to yourself or someone else. That means you're still not successful.
I think all entrepreneurs are dreamers and they enjoy dreaming and thinking what could be. So as soon as you do one thing, you're thinking about, that was great, I enjoyed that journey and now what's the next thing that I can actually do? So I don't think entrepreneurs generally don't retire.
They just move on to different things. Two months after the first visit, Michael was presented with an opportunity he just couldn't pass up. Hi, I'm Michael Birch. In 2005, my wife and I launched Bebo.
On July 1st, we bought Bebo back, and I think we can all agree it's time to wipe the slate clean. Michael ended up buying back the social networking site for a million dollars, 849 million less than he sold it for. It's obvious he has an emotional attachment to the company that publicly defined him.
But was this just a case of him buying back his baby, or a genuine attempt to build it back up again? The new Bebo will be very different from the old one. Bebo was something I didn't expect to come back into our lives. So when we sold it, I had no intent or wish to ever have control of it or develop it again. And then time passed by and we watched it kind of decline.
We just thought it would be actually fun at this point. The world had moved on a lot, social media had moved on. So the challenge was, can you reinvent a social media site? Can you reinvent a website, in fact?
Most brands or all brands that you can think of that have died out have not come back. We knew the opportunity was available. We knew we wouldn't have to pay a great deal of money for it. And it just seemed that if anyone else bought it, they were just going to use it as a kind of mailing list to promote whatever business they're running at the time. And we thought that's kind of a shame for it to end its life in that way.
Will it work? Who knows? But one thing's for certain, it'll be fun trying. After the 2045 Congress in New York, Dimitri went off the radar.
And it took more than two months before he agreed to meet again, this time in Dallas. His devotion to the Avatar project is obvious, but is he sacrificing everything for a life of city hopping and lonely hotel rooms? I never felt lonely.
Never. At home, at hotel, I actually live alone. But I'm not looking to find anybody to be my company. On the contrary, I like being alone.
It's a good time for you to watch your mind, to think about your life, about your progress, to meditate. The hotel room is my refuge. I don't have enough time to have kids. I don't have enough time to have even a wife, you know.
It's a pity maybe, but I have what I have. Before Dmitri dedicated his life to pursuing immortality, He made his billion-dollar fortune in Moscow as a media magnet in web-based news publishing. Of course, there has been a period when money was the motivation.
I just realized that I couldn't earn everything. And I decided to stop for some time just to explore different opportunities. Because you can spend all your life doing more and more, and what will you have? I realized that I will come to the dead end, you know.
The game will be over. And I myself, I try to look for something more, for something which probably you cannot describe with words, but you can feel. Obviously, to do that, you have to try to live without, you know, family, without your hobby, without your favorite business. And just, this is, I think, the beginning of your natural way of finding who you are.
He said hello. You know, immortal life itself... It's not a goal to have the opportunity. To live longer and to explore more in this external world and in the internal world is the goal.
Once you separate yourself from the body, from the physical body, which you always consider to be the essential part of yourself, once you do that, here emerges the question of who you are. And that has been the most important question in my life. Dimitri is in Dallas to spend a few days with robotic designer David Hansen. In a renewed attempt to create an avatar head, he'll be proud to show the world. It's a bit weird, is it, looking at yourself after all this time?
No. No? It's not. This is the first time that I've done live drawing. Of my subject for my robot.
Generally, I've done the robot portraits of people who are passed away. Like Albert Einstein and Philip K. Dick. The idea of the Avatar project is to create the alternative for the human body and the head is just the first step. It's to show that the...
The essence of myself can be in that robot as well. And when it comes to the head, I mean, what was the reason for sort of using your own image? You know, it's easy to experiment with yourself, always.
obviously I have to be everywhere to represent the idea of the avatar and the idea of future human evolution. So I think it's more picture to have someone with you which is like you, completely like you. Dimitri's ultimate goal is to live life as a hologram. But until then, he has a much more practical application for the current technology he revealed is out there. Look.
If we take something like this for the disabled patients, imagine the quadriplegic person controlling the human-like robot. I think this will add some sense to the idea of... migrating to different bodies in the future. And through the invasive chip now, you can realize the transfer of feelings, movements, and even vision and hearing quite soon. We need probably five years of integration, five years of studies, but everything is created.
I mean, the technology is here. Being a billionaire has without doubt enabled Dimitri to forge ahead. with his dream.
But maybe it's his naivety and perseverance that made him a billionaire in the first place. Either way, he's undeterred by the colossal challenges ahead of him. I am criticized, you know, the idea is criticized. And sometimes people just don't want to educate themselves, don't want to read everything carefully, they just start criticizing. But I'm good with it because this is the, you know, the process of...
bringing this idea to them. I mean, I'm happy that I was able to draw their attention. First they can criticize, then they will come and they explore something and they will find something for themselves. Probably for some of those critics. I will be able to deliver avatars, which will help them.
And they will say, thank you, I was wrong. You might think that billionaires are defined by their wealth. But they would argue wealth is a byproduct of big ideas.
They're interested in fulfilling their dreams. And the crazier the dream, the better.