It’s late April in Los Angeles, and I’m bobbing and weaving through a crowd at a downtown film production studio to watch what’s been billed as the world’s first sperm race. There’s a stage, a Jumbotron, and ring girls in white miniskirts. The game is about to begin, and a woman in a lab coat peppers a contestant with questions about his health. “How long since your racers last raced?” she asks. (This, it seems, is a euphemism for masturbating.) “Sunday, 11:59 p.m.,” he replies. “I’m at max fertile motility, ready to go.”
The event, put on by a company aptly named Sperm Racing, was originally slated to take place at the Hollywood Palladium—a historic concert hall with enough room to accommodate an audience of nearly 4,000 people. But days before the race was set, a change of venue was announced. The reason for the change, per the event’s official representation, was due to “predatory stuff going on” with Live Nation, the event company that manages the Palladium. But according to a guy I’ll call Jimmy, who spoke at length with one of the Sperm Racing organizers, the venue fell through for more straightforward liability issues. Namely, said Jimmy, “Live Nation didn’t want the kids jerkin’ off in the green room.” (In a statement to Vanity Fair, Live Nation said that the “organizers decided they wanted their event” to include “live collection” and “gambling…which would have breached the contract.”)
What is a sperm race, anyway? Well, it’s all in the name, really. Round up a couple of guys, get a sample of their semen, and examine it under a microscope to see whose sperm swims faster. Contrary to what you may be thinking, the race doesn’t actually start until an hour or so after the sample is produced. This, as Eric Zhu, one of the founders of Sperm Racing, pointed out to me, is tricky because “the timeline is very, very tight. Let’s just say we have these guys jerking off like 10 or 20 minutes [before the event]. Then the integrity of the race is kind of fucked, because the cleaning process for sperm takes about an hour, if that makes sense.” (It doesn’t.) “So we wanted them to do it in the green room to make it so that it’s, you know, fresh, basically.”
Zhu has a mop of dark hair and the puckish demeanor of a guy who was kicked out of high school, which, in fact, he was. In addition to his work at an early stage venture firm, Zhu cofounded his third company, Sperm Racing, four years after launching his second company, a private-market data analytics platform called Aviato, out of his Indiana high school bathroom. He is 17 years old.
Zhu is probably some kind of genius. At the very least, he has an innate understanding of what works in today’s online entertainment panopticon, owing to the fact that, in late April, his company staged an event of surreal proportions centered, entirely, on male ejaculate. In the weeks leading up to the event, Zhu, along with some talented friends, created a sleek video teaser styling the sperm race as a boxing match between chiseled competitors from rival LA universities. In it, two men dressed in boxer briefs mug for the camera while a gravel-throated commentator wonders whose “swimmers” will be “the healthiest,” “the fastest,” and “the tastiest.”
As evidenced by the length of this story, this bait proved irresistible to a media exhausted by tariff coverage, and in the space of three weeks, LA’s sperm race generated dozens of global and national news stories, including eight separate stories from TMZ. Much of this press was, I’m sorry to say, well-deserved, if only for the fact that the sperm race packed in several hours of genuinely entertaining and lavishly produced nonsense. (That nonsense, in brief overview, included multiple professional emcees and sperm race commentators, an elaborate set piece in which losers were doused in creamy white liquid, and a performance by Grammy-nominated rap artist Ty Dolla $ign.)
But in the days following the event, questions emerged about the authenticity of the race itself. A story published by Bari Weiss’s Free Press divulged that it is likely scientifically impossible to create any kind of circumstance in which sperm will race. This all checks out, given the fact that the race looked fake—and was, according to a guy I spoke to who helped organize the footage, almost entirely CGI-generated. While Zhu acknowledges that the video of the race is CGI-generated, he says it’s based on coordinates obtained from real prerecorded footage of the sperm samples. (Notably, Sperm Racing partnered with the betting platform Polymarket, where more than $300,000 in wagers were placed on the main race’s supposedly live outcome.)
When I mentioned the Free Press story to Zhu, he told me that it was a “very inaccurate” “hit piece” that was politically motivated because “Bari [Weiss] wasn’t a big fan of me.” (Weiss tells Vanity Fair, “When we assigned the story I had no idea who Eric Zhu was” and that she had no idea that the reporter was going to “uncover what he did…. I said yes to the pitch because it contained the word ‘sperm race.’”)
While questions regarding the authenticity of sperm racing are interesting, they are not nearly as interesting as the question this story is concerned with, which is one you may already be wondering: Why are we trying to race sperm in the first place?
One answer can be found in Zhu, whose PR-friendly messaging on this point relies primarily on the unhappy discoveries of a 2017 scientific study, which goes something like this: There is something wrong with Western sperm, which, as we know, includes our very own homegrown American sperm. The American sperm are in danger. They are evaporating. Our nation’s sperm are no longer showing up to do the job that sperm is supposed to do, which is to swim, rapidly and with great determination, to penetrate an egg in order to form a zygote, which turns into a fetus and eventually a baby. These days, the sperm are taking it easy. In fact, as this study points out, there has been nearly a 60% decline in sperm counts among Western men between 1973 and 2011.
These numbers, Zhu said, “are absolutely insane. And the reason for that is because no one’s talking about it. No one’s actually treating [sperm] as a biomarker because it’s so taboo. I never talk to my friends like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna make our sperm swim faster.’”
Zhu talks so fast and says so many incredible things that it is often difficult to understand what he’s actually saying, and once you do, to take it as fact. For instance, when I first met him at a venture capitalist’s dinner party in late April, Zhu told me, in what seemed a ridiculous story, that ever since he was a little boy, he had wanted to race sperm. Later, he clarified that he first came up with the idea for sperm racing at a concert he attended with a group of rich people who spoke passionately about how sperm can be used as a biomarker for health.
Soon after that conversation took place, Zhu says he was flown to New York by a billionaire who asked him the craziest idea he’d ever had for a company. Jokingly, and because he couldn’t come up with anything else—again, this is Zhu’s telling—Zhu replied, “Bro, if I wasn’t working on my current company, I’d be doing sperm racing.” Here is where the billionaire did the very thing that billionaires are so uniquely positioned to do, which is to turn glib jokes into unavoidable realities. In the space of 30 minutes, the billionaire convinced Zhu not only that a live sperm race was a very good idea, but that Zhu was the one to do it.
As it turned out, the billionaire was right: It was a good idea. Such a good idea, in fact, that once Zhu started talking to investors, he raised, in a week, $1.5 million—some of it crypto, the rest from venture firms and private investors. One of these investors was so enthusiastic that, according to Zhu, he wired over $300,000 before even having an introductory phone call.
This $1.5 million served as the catalyst for turning what would have only been suitable entertainment for a couple of bored teens in their parents’ basement into an attraction that packed several hundred people and an entire press corps into a stadium, including many more who watched online.
All of this leads to my next question: Who are these rich men, anyway, who are in such a tizzy over the supposed racing capabilities of sperm that they would spend $1.5 million to finance an allegedly phony sperm race? Well, Zhu can’t really say. For instance, when I asked for further clarity about the identities of the rich people at the concert, Zhu would only tell me that they were friends of Bryan Johnson, the internet personality and wealthy biohacker who created a longevity movement called Don’t Die. As for the billionaire who flew Zhu to New York, he is “a very private billionaire.” (Because Zhu is currently interviewing to be a Thiel Fellow—another thing he can’t talk about—and because Zhu’s company Aviato has received funding from Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale’s venture fund, I asked if it was Thiel or Lonsdale. To this, Zhu replied, no, it was “not someone mainstream you would probably know,” although he’s “really involved in the Elon camp and stuff like that.”)
Zhu is also not at liberty to name the guy who wired over the $300,000, but “you’ll probably see it in a little bit,” after Sperm Racing announces its latest round of financing, which Zhu says is in the ballpark of $5 million. (This money, at least in theory, will be used to fund future sperm races; on the afternoon we spoke, Zhu said he had just talked with the Las Vegas mayor’s office to discuss potential opportunities within the city.) When, at the race, I met one of Sperm Racing’s investors, Amr Al-Shihabi of Karman Ventures, and asked for an interview, he appeared genuinely alarmed. Then he told me to call him later and nervously rattled off his phone number before retreating to the safety of the teen-influencer-filled VIP area. (When I followed up by phone, Al-Shihabi said he could not speak to the media until his firm issued a press release which would be “a few months out.”)
This relative secrecy may at first suggest some kind of wealthy cabal with financial interests rooted in the sperm production of young men. What’s more likely, however, is that these rich people, while apparently perfectly happy to throw a couple hundred thousand dollars in pocket change at an outlandish idea, are still figuring out if Sperm Racing is the kind of thing they would like to be associated with publicly. Which is frankly understandable, given the potential liabilities of running a sportsbook on the allegedly scripted outcome of an allegedly fake race, not to mention the palpably sleazy connotations that the words sperm race immediately conjure. (Zhu says, “These are actually real races…. The outcome wasn’t scripted. The outcome was basically from the video footage, and also, only four people knew about [the outcome who were] in the room.”)
At one point, Zhu says Sperm Racing considered featuring a race between two health-obsessed celebrity contestants, Don’t Die founder Johnson and Andrew Huberman, the Stanford neuroscientist who hosts one of the world’s most popular health podcasts, Huberman Lab. But then, Zhu changed his mind once he realized that Johnson’s audience is mostly made up of “weirdos” and that “most people don’t know who Andrew Huberman is.” This is when Zhu realized who would be the perfect contestants—and for that matter, the perfect audience—for a sperm race: college students. Never mind that 18-to-22-year-old men are the least likely to deal with infertility. What matters is that college students are people who, according to Zhu, both “get really hyped” and “get the most hype.” By which Zhu means: The audience that generates the most interest—far more than a bunch of middle-aged men—is young people.
As it turns out, there is a particular type of young person who does “get really hyped” about a live Sperm Racing event—and that young person is most likely a young man who wants to have lots and lots of children. I spoke to about half a dozen young men at the sperm race who told me they hoped to have a brood of their own—four, five, even nine kids a piece. (“If kids are truly the light of your life and give you purpose, why not go all in on kids?” a guy wearing a MAGA cap told me with surprising soulfulness about why he, a man in his early 20s, hoped to someday father nine children.) I discovered that many of these young men had recently given up watching porn and drinking alcohol. I learned, too, about their sperm, which, as one Sperm Racing contestant told me, was so “super strong” that it had the ability to “go through IUDs.”
Ridiculous as they may sound, these kinds of anecdotes are products of an emergent masculinity in America, in which young men, increasingly, are unafraid to be men. This is the era of pronatalism and Elon Musk, of Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, of CEOs who train for martial arts and talk about boardroom strategy in the terms of Spartan generals. This is the generation that belongs to Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. And there is no finer distillation of our current masculine fixation than that increasingly elusive marker of virility, sperm itself.
If our preceding cultural era was overshadowed by the protective instincts of the uterus in the form of women’s liberation, abortion access, human rights, and environmentalism, then the era of sperm is preoccupied with production, with its own utility, with getting those deadbeat sperm up off the couch to once again do the job that sperm are meant to do.
Or in other words, “some weird Elon Musk shit,” as one man with a trim goatee told me at the event. He was noticeably older than the 20-something-year-old crowd, and had attended the sperm race in hopes that he might find a brand partnership with the contraception companies he worked with.
Milling outside the venue was a group of men, one of whom was pulling a Sperm Racing sweatshirt over his head that he’d recently purchased from a vendor out front. He told me that he’d discovered the sperm race on Instagram.
“I’m like, man, me and my boys gotta come out here and check it out because it supports the culture and everything.”
“What’s the culture?” I asked.
“Men’s health,” said a guy standing next to him. “Sperm.”
“The culture is sperm?”
“You could say that all of our cultures are sperm,” he replied. “If you think about it, where did we come from? What was the beginning? At the end of the day, do you come from your mother’s womb or your dad’s balls?”
The young men were quiet for a moment, reflecting. I asked what they thought the answer to this question was.
“Your dad’s balls, duh,” the guy in the sweatshirt replied. “If they weren’t fertile enough, then we wouldn’t be here.”
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