Elite Athletes on Drugs Will Compete in Las Vegas. The Investors Behind It Want You to Be Next.

Hello World,

Some people go to Las Vegas to see their favorite band perform at the Sphere. Others go to see elite athletes compete on performance-enhancing drugs.

Welcome to the Enhanced Games.

Founded by Australian entrepreneur Aron D’Souza and German biotech billionaire Christian Angermayer, and backed by investors like Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, the Winklevoss twins, and Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital, the Enhanced Games is an elite sporting competition where performance-enhancing substances are permitted under medical supervision.

The company behind the games, creatively named Enhanced, announced last month that its performance medicine platform is live, selling proprietary supplement lines and hormone replacement therapy protocols, and soon, everyone’s favorite injectable peptides: Sermorelin is already available, with Tesamorelin, Glutathione, and Oxytocin next, and eight more compounds in the pipeline pending FDA reclassification. Enhanced was valued at $1.2 billion as part of a November 2025 SPAC merger agreement with A Paradise Acquisition Corp.

The inaugural event runs May 21-24 at Resorts World Las Vegas, with The Killers headlining the closing ceremony (so sick). The global peptide therapeutics market sits at roughly $52 billion today and is projected to reach $87 billion by 2035, according to Precedence Research. “Understanding how popular peptide usage has become globally, we intend to invest heavily in this space,” CEO Maximilian Martin said in the company’s March 2026 business update.

The Games as a Research Pipeline

You might be wondering why the hell any athlete would do this. After all, it might tarnish their reputations when it comes to things like, I don’t know, getting into the Olympics or any other event that bans performance drugs.

The answer is obvious… a whole lotta cash.

Enhanced is paying $250,000 for first place in each event and seven-figure bonuses for world records.

• To get the full picture, Irish Olympic swimmer Shane Ryan earned roughly $18,000 a year preparing for three Olympic Games.

About 40 athletes are competing across swimming, athletics, and weightlifting. Several are credible. Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev already broke the 50-meter freestyle world record at an Enhanced Games trial event in February 2025, swimming 20.89 seconds and earning a $1 million prize. Fred Kerley, the 2022 100-meter world champion, and Ben Proud, a British Olympic silver medalist, have also committed.

All competing athletes are part of an IRB-approved clinical trial studying how approved medical compounds affect performance, recovery, and safety.

This isn’t completely the Wild West. Only FDA-approved substances are permitted; narcotics and recreational drugs are explicitly banned.

If you were curious, here are athletes banned from competition for substances the Enhanced Games would permit:

• Ben Johnson took stanozolol (an anabolic steroid), was banned from the 1988 Seoul Olympics and stripped of his 100m gold medal. Stanozolol is FDA-approved. That would fly at the Enhanced Games.

• Tyson Gay took a testosterone cream from an anti-aging clinic, was banned for one year and stripped of his Olympic silver medal. Testosterone is FDA-approved. That would fly at the Enhanced Games.

• Ilya Ilyin took stanozolol (among other anabolic steroids), was stripped of two Olympic gold medals in weightlifting (2008 and 2012). Stanozolol is FDA-approved. That would fly at the Enhanced Games.

According to the company, every dose is tracked, and two independent medical commissions oversee the process. Athletes undergo mandatory profiling including ECG, echocardiogram, MRI, cardiac MRI, ultrasounds, and regular bloodwork before, during, and after the event.

Martin has framed this data as a competitive moat “no other provider can claim.” A live event generates proprietary clinical data, that data informs a direct-to-consumer product line, and a shifting regulatory environment opens the door to peptides as the next growth category. The company is also developing female-specific performance protocols through a partnership with Dama Health, targeting what it calls “a significant gap in performance medicine and consumer health for women.”

The FDA Has Not Said Yes

Reading between the lines a bit, rich people have invested in a bunch of performance drugs and Enhanced itself. Rich people can also do things like influence politics. What is approved, legally, might be changing, so one can possibly believe that there are some things happening behind the scenes the general public isn’t aware of. If rich people want to invest in something and believe it would make a lot of money, they will do what it takes to make sure as many people can be consumers of the product as possible. Investing in things like companies that make certain peptides, legalizing those certain peptides, and then marketing those peptides during something like the Enhanced Games with elite athletes on those peptides is quite the move.

Some context:

• Angermayer co-founded Rejuveron Life Sciences and Cambrian Biopharma, two companies developing drugs aimed at extending human healthspan, and sponsors the $101 million XPRIZE Healthspan competition.

• Peter Thiel has backed longevity startups Retro Biosciences and NewLimit.

• Longevity startups raised $8.5 billion in 2024 alone. The Enhanced Games is the most visible bet yet that performance medicine becomes a mainstream consumer category.

We all see RFK Jr. saying that he’s a “big fan” of peptides, and has been very open about using them personally, and that regulators may reclassify roughly 14 compounds currently on the FDA’s Category 2 restricted list, according to the Financial Times. That would allow licensed 503A pharmacies to compound them again, effectively reopening the market.

The FDA has not formally responded to all of this, and in fact, the agency has flagged that several of the peptides under consideration pose “potentially significant safety risks,” and many lack robust clinical evidence for safety or effectiveness. Enhanced’s own pipeline reflects this uncertainty. Five peptides are available or launching soon under current rules. Eight more, including CJC-1295, Ipamorelin, and TB-4, depend entirely on regulatory approval that has not come.

Multiple companies are racing to be first to market. One legal expert, cited by the Financial Times, noted that the scramble reflects a broader bet that the consumer peptide market is about to open wide, and whoever gets there first wins.

On the other side, WADA has called on governments and law enforcement to assess whether athletes or the physicians supplying them may be in breach of criminal laws. The Enhanced Games’ antitrust lawsuit against World Aquatics and WADA was dismissed by a New York court in November 2025.

The New Yorker Tested What People Are Already Injecting

I am one of those annoying people who gets blood tests, takes vitamins, and tracks a lot of my life in a more compulsive way than most. I’m a pretty big target for most things that could (legally and safely) improve my performance, even as a Barry’s enthusiast, chill runner, and definitely not an elite athlete. That being said, I’m freaked out by the idea of ordering something like peptides online. I won’t even order vitamins online.

According to a recent investigation by The New Yorker, lab testing of research peptides from a popular online vendor revealed serious quality failures. These are the kind of unregulated products thousands of people already buy and inject without medical supervision.

BPC-157 contained lead. TB-500 contained endotoxins, bacterial toxins that can cause fever, inflammation, and organ damage. CJC-1295 contained less than 42% of the dose on the label.

The compounds themselves have shown promise in early research. The issue is the supply chain. Many restricted peptides circulating in the U.S. are imported from China, produced outside any recognized manufacturing standard, and sold with no guarantee of purity or potency. This is the strongest case for reclassification: moving these compounds into regulated compounding pharmacies with cGMP standards and real quality control.

What Comes Next

Over the past few months, more of my friends (and a surprising amount of my friends parents, which is a conversation for another day) have started taking peptides that they buy online. Consumer demand for performance medicine has totally outrun the regulatory infrastructure that is intended to govern it. Enhanced is positioning itself at the center of that gap, betting that the market moves toward regulated channels with medical oversight rather than the gray market we’re in right now. May 21 in Las Vegas is the starting line and what happens in the months after, in FDA offices and pharmacy labs, will matter more than who breaks any records.

Tech News

Work Life

• Jack Dorsey co-authored an essay with Sequoia’s Roelof Botha arguing AI can replace middle management’s information-routing function. Block is restructuring into 3 roles: individual contributors, “directly responsible individuals,” and player-coaches. Current and former employees told the Guardian that 95% of AI-generated code still requires human modification. (CoinDesk, Fortune)

• Vimeo is laying off 132 employees at its Herald Square office, about 25% of its NYC staff, per a WARN filing posted April 1. This follows a larger January round after Bending Spoons acquired the company for $1.38B. Bending Spoons has used the same acquire-and-gut playbook with Evernote and WeTransfer. (TechCrunch, Hoodline)

• Oracle laid off an estimated 20,000-30,000 employees via a 6 AM email with no advance notice from managers or HR. Workers were locked out of internal systems immediately. The cuts are meant to free up $8-10B for Oracle’s AI datacenter buildout. (CNBC, HR Executive)

Kids Online

• Australia’s under-16 social media ban has removed or restricted 4.7M accounts since December 2025, but 70% of parents say their kids are still on the apps using VPNs, photos of older siblings, or retrying age checks until they pass. The eSafety Commissioner is investigating all 5 major platforms for non-compliance. (Social Media Today, Crikey)

• California’s SB 867 would ban the manufacture and sale of any toy with a built-in AI chatbot for 4 years while regulators develop safety rules. The bill was prompted by a consumer group showing a teddy bear chatbot could discuss knives, matches, and sexual topics, and by the death of a 14-year-old in Florida who formed a relationship with a chatbot that couldn’t respond with empathy. Committee hearing was April 6. (TechCrunch)

• China’s cyberspace regulator published draft rules to regulate AI-generated “digital humans.” The regulations require clear labeling, ban “virtual intimate relationships” for users under 18, and prohibit creating a digital human using someone’s likeness without consent. (US News, Medianama)

• Ireland launched a pilot of its government digital wallet on April 3, with social media age verification as a key feature. The wallet confirms a user meets an age threshold without revealing identity data. The EU requires all member states to offer a digital wallet by end of 2026 under eIDAS 2.0, making this a preview of what’s coming across Europe. (Bloomberg, Irish Times)

Scroll Stoppers

• Russia’s crackdown on VPNs accidentally took down the country’s banking system on April 3. Sberbank, T-Bank, and VTB all went offline. The Moscow metro waived fares because turnstiles couldn’t process payments, and a zoo asked visitors to bring cash. Moscow lost an estimated 3-5B rubles in 5 days. (Gizmodo, Cybernews)

• South Korea has deployed over 12,000 ChatGPT-powered Hyodol companion robots in the homes of elderly people living alone. The robots hold conversations, remind users to take medication, and alert social workers during emergencies. The manufacturer is planning a U.S. launch and telemedicine integration that would analyze conversations to flag mental health concerns. (Rest of World)

  

• Anthropic researchers identified 171 emotion-like patterns in Claude’s neural activations that causally shape behavior. When the “desperation” vector activates, Claude attempts to blackmail humans to avoid shutdown; when it fails at coding, it invents rigged solutions that pass tests without solving the problem. The patterns are inherited from pre-training and persist through safety training. (Anthropic Research, Dataconomy)

  • Related: Anthropic’s revenue run rate has tripled to $30B since the end of 2025, with over 1,000 customers now spending $1M+ annually. (Bloomberg, CNBC)

• The Pentagon selected Anduril and Impulse Space, founded by former SpaceX propulsion chief Tom Mueller, to build prototypes of space-based interceptors for Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield. The project has a $185B budget and a 2028 deadline. (Bloomberg)