The story of fitness fortunes aging across six decades is really a story about mortality and the American refusal to accept it. Every fitness fortune profiled in The Chronicles, from Jane Fonda’s $200 million to Ben Greenfield’s Idaho compound, represents a different chapter in our culture’s evolving negotiation with the body’s inevitable decline. The money is the byproduct. The anxiety is the fuel.
The VHS Era: Aging as Vanity Problem
In the 1980s, fitness was about looking good. Jane Fonda sold 17 million workout tapes not because Americans feared heart disease but because they feared being unattractive. Billy Blanks, Denise Austin, Richard Simmons: each addressed a different aesthetic anxiety, but the underlying proposition was the same. Your body is betraying you. Buy this tape and fight back.
The VHS fortunes were modest by today’s standards because the product was simple and the distribution was analog. But the cultural work was enormous. The fitness video normalized the idea that aging is a problem with a commercial solution. Before Fonda, aging was something you endured. After Fonda, aging was something you purchased your way around.
The Digital Era: Aging as Data Problem
The app generation reframed aging from a vanity problem to an optimization challenge. Kayla Itsines didn’t sell beauty. She sold transformation metrics: before-and-after photos, progress tracking, community accountability. Jeff Cavaliere sold biomechanical intelligence. Cassey Ho sold consistent daily practice.
The fortunes grew larger because digital platforms eliminated distribution costs and enabled global scale. But the cultural shift was subtler. Fitness became quantified. Steps, calories, macros, reps, sets, progressive overload, the language of fitness merged with the language of productivity. Your body became a dashboard. Aging was just a decline in your metrics.
The Wellness Era: Aging as Medical Problem
The guru class, profiled in our wellness influencer guide, reframed aging again. Andrew Huberman brought neuroscience. Mark Hyman brought functional medicine. Dave Asprey brought biohacking. The message evolved from “look better” to “live longer” to “reverse your biological age.”
This reframing was commercially brilliant. When fitness is about appearance, the addressable market is limited to the appearance-conscious. When fitness becomes medicine, the addressable market is everyone who doesn’t want to die. The $29 billion longevity industry exists because someone figured out that fear of death is a bigger market than fear of love handles.
The Longevity Era: Aging as Engineering Problem
Bryan Johnson spending $2 million annually to reduce his biological age isn’t fitness. It isn’t even wellness. It’s engineering, treating the human body as a system to be debugged, optimized, and eventually reprogrammed. The $25,000 executive physical. The $40,000 longevity retreat. The $100,000 concierge medicine membership. These are line items in a project plan, not lifestyle choices.
The fortunes in this era are the largest yet because the spending per customer is the highest. When aging was a vanity problem, the solution cost $19.95 (a VHS tape). It became a data problem, and the price climbed to $15 per month (an app). Now that aging is an engineering problem, the solution costs $50,000 to $300,000 per year, as detailed in our old money wellness spending decoder.
What the Money Reveals
Follow the fitness fortunes across six decades and a pattern emerges. Each era’s biggest winners identified the next escalation in American health anxiety and built the commercial infrastructure to serve it. Fonda served vanity. Itsines served productivity. Huberman served optimization. The longevity industry serves existential dread.
The wellness grift spectrum exists because each escalation creates new opportunities for both legitimate innovation and opportunistic extraction. The $190 billion supplement industry, the $25 billion medspa economy, and the billion-dollar wellness acquisitions all trace back to a simple proposition: your body is declining, and someone has a solution for sale.
The Question Nobody Asks
Six decades of fitness fortunes and $6 trillion in global wellness spending haven’t solved the problem they promise to address. Americans are not, on average, meaningfully healthier than they were when Jane Fonda pressed record on that first VHS tape. The fortunes grew. The waistlines didn’t shrink.
Perhaps that’s the most revealing insight of all. The fitness industry doesn’t sell health. It sells the feeling of doing something about health. And that feeling, it turns out, is worth more than the health itself. The VO2 max status symbol is just the latest version of a story as old as the first workout tape: performing wellness as proof of virtue, discipline, and control over the one thing none of us can actually control.
The fortunes will keep growing. The body will keep declining. The space between those two facts is where every dollar in this industry lives.