Last July, the internet ignited in a fit of erotic-capitalistic ecstasy. No, it wasn't because of Pornhub's net neutrality protest or the latest teledildonics patent lawsuit. Instead, the virtual pulsation was caused by the bulging biceps of the world's richest man.

Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, had appeared at Idaho's elite Sun Valley annual conference with a jacked new muscle-daddy frame. The people of the web were shook.

Love this on Amazon Jeff Bezos' transformation pic.twitter.com/Ngtn7bnAd5 — Ashley Armstrong (@AArmstrong_says) July 18, 2017

Memes quickly spread comparing the balding, baggy-sweater-wearing Bezos of 1998 to the ripped Vin Diesel-esque Bezos of the present day. Now, 2017 Bezos was no John Hamm or Adam Levine. He was nowhere near the top of the world's hottest men list (please disregard Blake Shelton), but it wasn't his objective hotness that garnered attention. It was the fact that at age 53, he had transformed from an average tech worker, frequently donning a baggy sweater over already oversized shirts and pleated khakis, into a verified stud.

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By most measures, at the time of Amazon's founding in 1994, Bezos was not hot. Early photos show Bezos donning ill-fitting, business casual clothing with a steadily receding hairline. But, as the years went by, Bezos transformed, his clothes becoming more tailored and slim-fitting, along with a trimmer physique. By 2014, Bezos had embraced a sleek shaved head, and was primed for his final zaddy evolution a few years later.

The transformation runs counter to the Western aesthetic narrative of men hitting their physical Prime in their 20s and declining in sexual or beautific value from there (think Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio). But Bezos isn't the only founder that got hot(ter).

Jack Dorsey, founder and CEO of Square and Twitter, was a blue-haired punk in 1999, and in 2006 sported a questionable nose ring. Hot to some, but probably not the majority. In 2013, when Twitter went public, Dorsey streamlined his look, shaving his head and donning designer suits. By 2015, Jack had adopted his current, much more traditionally sexy, look of a rugged, loaded biker.

While Jack's physique doesn't appear to change much over time, his dress, grooming, and overall style has significantly evolved over his career, moving from explicitly countercultural to straight-up trendy, conventional hot.

The geek-founder-turned-hottie trend begs the question: Why do founders get hotter as they age as us plebeians shrivel away into ugly obscurity as the seconds tick by?

Dorsey's progression towards the tech industry's Brad Pitt points towards the most obvious answer: money. As founders become more successful, raking in billions, they can easily afford fashions, treatments, trainers and regimens that might make them hotter. Jack Dorsey clearly spends his hard-earned billions on grooming and fashion. Bezos may or may not have gotten a trainer and some high-quality human growth hormone. And Elon Musk probably shelled out for some really great hair plugs.

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A 2014 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that people in lower income brackets exercised less, drank less water and were more likely to eat unhealthy food. A 2012 study found that as wealth increases, so to do healthier food choices like buying whole produce or whole grains. Some sociologists believe that healthier eating and wealth are correlated simply because the wealthy can afford better food.

Founders with access to fountains of youth may also be connected to Silicon Valley's obsession with defying age and living forever. Just like Intel believed in Moore's Law of the exponential growth in the power of computer chips, tech's new heavyweights have put their energy behind the ethos of transhumanism, that envisions exponential growth of the human lifespan through technology. The interest in extending life among Silicon Valley elites, seemingly stemming from a hacker's perspective on life sciences (death is but a problem set to be solved) has become an animating force in the industry.

Google and Alphabet have invested billions in anti-aging efforts, including their top-secret company Calico, whose core mission is to study aging, and Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences). Ray Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering, reportedly takes 90 supplements a day to combat the effects of aging (apparently he looks "much younger" than 70), and plans to be cryogenically frozen. Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel have both invested in Unity Biotechnology, a company that claims to be developing a drug that will "vaporize a third of human diseases in the developed world" by targeting cells that produce "the zombie toxin" as they age, which causes chronic inflammation. The drug reportedly increases the median life-span in mice by 35 percent.

Thiel is perhaps the most notorious anti-aging fanatic of the tech titans, previously writing against "the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual," and reportedly investigating the potential of parabiosis — the idea that the blood of younger people transfused into older people can help them maintain longevity. Thiel's Personal Health Director Jason Camm reportedly reached out to the founder of Ambrosia, a company conducting parabiosis trials, after it posted advertisements about one of its studies.

Unfortunately, there are no studies connecting aesthetic beauty to wild Silicon Valley aging treatments, but its a safe bet the aesthetics of the aged are a result of some of the processes that Silicon Valley's transhumanists are targeting with their treatments.

There's more to money's effect on techno-corporate aesthetics than just access to resources. Dorsey's and Bezos's upgrades, which have just as much to do with style as physique, are clear transitions towards looks dictated by our current style trends. Before becoming accountable to shareholders Jack's blue hair and Bezos's fuzzy pullovers were probably less of a concern to them — they were simply trying to get a good product off the ground. But as their companies became more successful, they also become more accountable to their employees and shareholders. Now, it's not just VCs they need to impress, who may be used to the eccentricities of some of the weirder figures of the bay area, its investors all over the world. As public pressure increases on companies, some of that is internalized by their CEOs, eventually transforming them into who the public wants them to be.