On Succession, Kendall's Recent Obsession Is Nothing New For The Billionaire Class
This post contains spoilers for "Succession."
The latest episode of the modern Shakespearean tragedy that is "Succession" season 4 features Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) as unhinged as they've ever been. While Shiv (Sarah Snook) currently seems to have her head on straight (by Roy standards, at least), the Roy brothers are already going mad with power. Roman's going on an ill-advised firing spree, and Kendall, most alarmingly, is trying to figure out a way to cure aging. Dying is "bulls**t," Kendall says, and he's kind of got a point: the average person only gets around seventy to eighty years, and most of that time is spent sleeping or working. Doesn't seem particularly fair, does it?
Of course, this is all undercut by the fact that Kendall and Roman's newfound anger at death is the result of their father's supposedly unexpected passing (in the best episode of the series thus far). Logan (Brian Cox) got to live 84 years, and he spent most of that time having so much wealth that he could've done nearly anything he wanted. He could've used that time to make things better with his kids or try to make the world a better place, and he chose to do neither. At the end of the latest episode, "Living+," when Kendall talks about how he'd give anything to have another year with his dad, it's delusional. Nothing about Logan's behavior throughout the first 32 episodes of the show indicated he'd ever meaningfully change; what good would an extra year have done him?
A show about wasted time
This is the central irony behind so much of this show: unlike most people, the characters on "Succession" don't need to spend so many hours a day on work, or chores, or any of the other menial tasks that take up so much of a regular person's life, but what are they doing with that extra time? They have the freedom and luxury that most people work decades just to get an occasional taste of, but they don't appreciate any of it. The characters are constantly surrounded by massive qualities of delicious-looking food, but they rarely seem to eat. "Kill List" featured Roman, Kendall and Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) standing in front of a breathtaking view of the Nesaksla mountain range, and not one of them even remarked on the sight.
In the end, the shortness of life is just a scapegoat Kendall has chosen, to deal with the fact that he never patched things up with their father and that he's still unhappy in general. The problem with Kendall isn't a lack of time; it's that the things he's chosen to do with that time are inherently hollow and unrewarding. An extra year wouldn't fix anything, but it sure is nice to imagine otherwise. But even though "Succession" depicts Kendall's new-found interest in immortality as a clear-cut symptom of his mania and self-centered nature, there's not much separating him from plenty of the billionaires of the real world. As it turns out, Kendall is far from the only rich person fascinated with the idea of cheating death. Guys like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are also fascinated with the possibility.
Potential sources of inspiration
When one wonders how the "Succession" writers came up with this new storyline, one can't help but think of Peter Thiel, a billionaire who dedicated a ton of money into start-ups working on anti-aging medicine and technology. Perhaps his most eye-grabbing statements on the issue are his support for the technique of transfusing the blood from young people into the veins of older people. This served as inspiration for a famous scene in another HBO show, "Silicon Valley," in which a billionaire does exactly that right in front of the bewildered main character. It's no surprise that satirical shows have zeroed in on this practice: the image of a rich person literally taking young people's blood for themselves — y'know, that thing vampires do — makes for a pretty potent metaphor for venture capitalism as a whole.
The blood stuff might also feel reminiscent of Matsson's reveal last week that he's been sending his own blood to a female assistant against her wishes, but Matsson's not a Peter Thiel-type billionaire. Surprisingly, he doesn't have much love for Kendall's new interest in immortality. His behavior in this episode (where he expresses his disapproval of Kendall's presentation with an offensive, immature tweet) instead feels reminiscent of Elon Musk.
Despite Musk's many controversial positions, the guy is not as on board with the push for anti-aging technology as you might expect. "I don't think we should try to have people live for a really long time," Musk said in a 2022 Insider interview. "It would cause asphyxiation of society because the truth is, most people don't change their mind. They just die. So if they don't die, we will be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn't advance."
Kendall's hypocrisy
That quote from Musk seems like exactly the sort of thing Kendall would've said before his father died. In fact, we've lost count of how many times he'd declared that his father was too old to keep running the business, that age had made him too out of touch with the rest of the world. When Logan was Kendall's main obstacle to becoming the Waystar CEO, Kendall probably would've been the first to argue that the current average lifespan is perfectly fine the way it is.
But as tends to happen, the dying out of his father's generation has reminded Kendall of the uncomfortable truth that, well, his generation's next. First your grandparents die, then your parents die, and then it's you. This is the ideal order of events, a reality that most people are made painfully aware of from an early age, but Kendall is still thrown by the realization.
In this latest episode, it's easy to see why: when it comes to everything else in the world, Kendall has total say. He comes up with a bunch of ridiculous, expensive suggestions for his Living+ presentation, and the crew has no choice but to go along with it because they'll lose their jobs if they don't. He decides to artificially inflate the company's numbers in his stubborn efforts to tank the Gojo deal, and so far the strategy's somehow working. Kendall can shape large swaths of the world around him to his will, but he still can't change the fact that he's going to die. Death has no manager Kendall can speak to, and this drives him crazy.
A self-serving interest
"Succession" has always taken advantage of every opportunity it gets to skewer topical issues. With the Vaulter storyline in the first two seasons, "Succession" brutally showcased just how much the digital media industry is at the mercy of the ever-changing whims of apathetic nepo babies. With the cruises storyline, the show dove into the sheer amount of systemic pushback that gets aimed at victims of sexual assault when the perpetrators are the rich and powerful.
It's with this latest storyline that "Succession" has decided to reveal the self-centered motivations beyond the one percent's seemingly altruistic obsession with prolonging human life. As many have pointed out already, a large percentage of the funding going into developing a real-life fountain of youth would be better spent on antibiotic innovations, or (medicine aside) just on things like affordable housing and healthcare. Income is a depressingly large indicator of a person's lifespan, after all, so if Kendall and real-life billionaires truly cared about this issue, you'd think they'd spare a thought in that direction.
Of course, it's not about prolonging everyone's lives to Kendall; it's more about prolonging his life, and maybe the lives of other rich people like him. But if "Succession" has made anything clear, it's that Kendall is far more like his father than he'd ever like to admit, and his father didn't get better with age either. The tragedy is that even if Kendall somehow managed to live fifty years longer than usual thanks to a bunch of expensive, exclusive medical treatments, he'd still be miserable. But for a show where all the characters are destroying each other for the chance at a CEO position — another thing that surely wouldn't make any of them happy either — Kendall's pointless pursuit of immortality feels right at home.
New episodes of "Succession" air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.