Young man and older man seated in chairs connected by a blood transfusion machine, labeled 'Blood Boy'.

Blood Boy

2017slang / catchphraseresurgent

Published October 22, 2026

Blood Boy is slang for a young donor who gives blood or plasma to a wealthy older client chasing anti-aging effects. The label took off after the May 21, 2017 Silicon Valley episode of the same name mocked billionaire Peter Thiel's reported interest in parabiosis, and it surged again in May 2023 when tech CEO Bryan Johnson posted a YouTube video about transfusing his 17-year-old son's plasma.

silicon valley satire memes slang memes tech humor memes tv show memes dark humor memes

Overview

Online, the Blood Boy label works as a sarcastic insult aimed at tech billionaires who buy teenagers' plasma hoping to slow aging. Twitter users began attaching it to news stories about biohacking founders, often alongside jokes about "literal capitalism vampires" after CNBC covered the Ambrosia startup paying donors $8,000 per transfusion1. The joke lives at the intersection of body-horror humor and class politics, since the premise reads like Elizabeth Bathory updated for Silicon Valley venture capital2.

Most Blood Boy posts are short text takes, screenshots of news articles, or video reactions rather than a fixed image macro. The format revived whenever a founder publicly bought into parabiosis, so the Bryan Johnson plasma story in 2023 produced the second big burst of jokes on TikTok and X3. Urban Dictionary logged a definition in September 2017 that framed the term as a healthy young person "used as a human blood bag" by a wealthy benefactor4.

Origin & Background

Platform
HBO (Silicon Valley) / Twitter (viral spread)
Date
2017

Catalyst event: On August 1, 2016, Inc. magazine published Jeff Bercovici's reporting on billionaire investor Peter Thiel's interest in receiving blood transfusions from younger donors, a practice called parabiosis5. The piece quoted Thiel calling the research "really interesting" and connected his funding to startup work on young-donor plasma.

Earliest meme usage: On May 21, 2017, HBO aired "The Blood Boy," the fifth episode of Silicon Valley's fourth season, in which fictional billionaire Gavin Belson receives a transfusion from a silent muscular young man during a business meeting2. The next day, Twitter user @jshorvath247 wrote that the scene was a "subtle jab at Peter Thiel and his alleged 'use of blood boys,'" one of the earliest public uses of the exact phrase as an insult6. YouTuber Felix mirrored the clip on May 23, 2017, where it drew roughly 250,000 views over the following six years7.

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How It Spread

Ten days after the HBO episode, on May 31, 2017, CNBC tweeted about Ambrosia, a startup charging older clients for transfusions of plasma from donors aged 16 to 25, which pushed the slang out of TV-recap circles and into finance and health Twitter1. Replies to that tweet are where the "capitalism vampires" reading got loudest, with users directly linking Ambrosia's business model to the Silicon Valley gag that aired the week before. By September 11, 2017, Urban Dictionary user anthnerd had added "blood boy" with a definition keyed to the HBO scene, logging over 800 upvotes in the years that followed4.

Regulators eventually noticed. On February 19, 2019, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb issued a statement warning consumers against clinics offering young-donor plasma for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other conditions, calling the infusions unproven and potentially unsafe8. Press coverage of the FDA warning recycled the Blood Boy framing from 2017, and Ambrosia paused operations shortly after.

The slang went viral a second time in May 2023 around Bryan Johnson, a 45-year-old tech millionaire running the Project Blueprint anti-aging protocol. On May 22, 2023, Johnson uploaded "Will My Son's Blood Make Me Younger?" to YouTube, where the video drew more than 291,000 views and 2,300 comments inside ten days9. TikTok creator @meganmakescomedy posted a reaction video the next day riffing on the father-son transfusion story, which collected nearly 1,300 likes over nine days3.

Timeline

2016-08-01

Inc. publishes Jeff Bercovici's article on Peter Thiel's interest in young-donor transfusions, introducing parabiosis to a mainstream readership.

2019-02-19

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb warns the public against young-donor plasma clinics in an official statement.

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How to Use This Meme

People typically deploy Blood Boy as a two-word jab in replies to news about longevity-obsessed founders, not as a captioned image. A common convention is to quote-tweet an article about a tech CEO's anti-aging regimen with just "blood boy" or "get a blood boy," treating the Silicon Valley scene as the shared reference. Longer posts often include the "capitalism vampires" framing that followed the Ambrosia coverage1.

Frequently Asked Questions