from Hacker News

Competitive Hormone Supplementation Is Shaping America's Future Business Titans

by surprisetalk on 6/15/25, 1:12 PM with 9 comments

  • by api on 6/15/25, 2:55 PM

    In the 1980s it was competitive cocaine insufflation. This may be an improvement.
  • by lukev on 6/15/25, 2:37 PM

    Very interesting to consider, and there's probably some truth here. Correlating "rich person behavior" with the drug of choice in various decades certainly feels right, though I'm not sure you can actually draw a causal link.

    One thing that's incorrect is that modern billionaires are more altruistic than their historical predecessors, and less likely to engage in conspicuous consumption. That's quite incorrect. Musk and Bezos own plenty of yachts.

    Modern billionaires also seem far less interested in donating to the general public good "out the door"... the trend these days is to form massive foundations for tax purposes, but still hold the reins pretty tightly to make sure we don't just do something as simple as building a public library or something that might let the money end up in the hands of the undeserving.

    And the counterexamples are also counterexamples to the pattern in the article... Gates gives a lot of money away, for example, but he's also not the poster boy for T supplementation and aggressive business practices at this point.

  • by thefz on 6/16/25, 3:11 PM

    This piece makes a lot of assumptions.

    > We don’t know what keeping moderately elevated testosterone levels does to someone, and my guess is that on net it’s positive.

    TRT has wild side effects, including gynecomastia and shrinking of the testes.

  • by 8f2ab37a-ed6c on 6/15/25, 8:53 PM

    Regardless of who's supplementing these hormones, if testosterone levels are gradually dropping for most of the male population, not just type-A CEOs, should this not be a serious issue to be investigated in the interest of all males?
  • by locopati on 6/16/25, 1:10 PM

    so... gender affirming health care