The businessman and entrepreneur Mark Cuban has conquered the worlds of Silicon Valley, by co-founding Broadcast.com, Hollywood, by starring in the reality-TV show Shark Tank, and the N.B.A., by buying the Dallas Mavericks. But he has yet to master one major frontier: sleep. Cuban takes melatonin, a sleep-aid hormone, before bed. Recently, he’s relied on his smartwatch to quit his supplement habit. “Having the data has allowed me to reduce the days I take it,” he tells me.
He isn’t alone. As the wealthy increasingly treat sleep as something to master, shut-eye data has become their new stock ticker. But achieving a perfect night’s rest isn’t as easy beyond the confines of blackout-shaded Atherton or Fifth Avenue bedrooms. For Cuban and his Forbes 400 cohort, constant travel has turned rest into a logistical problem, spawning a new eco-system of services designed to deliver perfect sleep anywhere, at any altitude.
That’s part of the reason VistaJet, the private-charter company, tapped the longevity expert Peter Attia to develop a sleep program for its moneyed fliers. “Your biology does not board the plane when you do,” Attia says to me. “It lags behind.”
Perhaps no one has promoted the power of sleep more relentlessly than Attia, whose book, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, was a New York Times best-seller in 2023 and 2024. But his book’s methods conflict with the lifestyles of his clientele: sleep, he says, “is often the first thing disrupted by travel.”
The result is a sleep program with cabins adjusted to Attia-approved temperature and lighting. On the company’s Global 7500 jets, flight attendants can tinker with the aircraft’s proprietary lighting system, which combats jet lag by carefully reducing passengers’ melatonin production.
Matteo Atti, VistaJet’s chief marketing officer, said the company developed the program because many sleep-obsessed members now travel longer distances on planes than in the past. There’s also a business case: much of the Silicon Valley set—from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg—has graduated from tracking sleep to trying to hack it.
Apollo Neuro is one company at the forefront of this new science. The company, which was last valued at over $100 million, delivers subtle, low-frequency vibrations via a $448 wristband to boost sleep quality. This touch therapy is designed to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, signaling to the brain that it’s safe to relax.
Other companies are targeting the brain directly: Elemind, a neuro-technology company co-founded by an M.I.T. professor, makes a $350 headband that delivers sound stimulation to help its users fall asleep faster.
And then there’s Eight Sleep’s $5,000 smart mattress cover, which automatically warms and cools itself based on its user’s heart rate. Around a decade ago, the Eight Sleep co-founder Matteo Franceschetti began considering how technology could improve one’s rest. “I started wondering why Elon Musk is taking me to Mars, and I still spend a third of my life on a piece of damn foam,” he says.
Franceschetti’s product skyrocketed in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic, coinciding with a shift in attitudes around rest. While C.E.O.’s historically bragged about how few hours they slept (the Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel once touted his four-and-a-half-hour sleep regimen), many now boast of the opposite. “Sleep deprivation is the new smoking,” Franceschetti says.
Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post, says that showing up to work on four hours’ sleep is comparable to showing up “effectively drunk.” In 2016, the Greek author turned mogul became the leading evangelist for the sleep-industrial complex, writing a book called The Sleep Revolution and starting Thrive Global, a company focused on improving well-being. “I think what caused the shift was the growing awareness of the science of sleep,” she tells me.
As sleep becomes the next big thing in luxury wellness, the travel industry has rushed to meet that demand. Franceschetti says he envisions his product being adopted by premium hotels. “The biggest ‘Aha!’ moment is the first time [Eight Sleep customers] travel, and they miss our technology so much that they just want to go back home and sleep again on our technology,” he says.
VistaJet has partnered with sleep-focused resorts such as Lanserhof, in Austria, and Marina Bay Sands, in Singapore, to offer deals to its clientele. Other resorts are also tapping into the sleep-tourism craze. In New York, the Equinox Hotel now offers a $1,700-per-night room called “the Sleep Lab,” which features a steam shower, smart-mattress technology, and automatic lighting tied to guests’ circadian rhythms.
Meanwhile, Hilton tapped the popular podcaster Paige DeSorbo to narrate a “Sleep Story” for guests in some of their hotels, and the Westin Hotels & Resorts teamed up with Gwyneth Paltrow on a video series about improving guests’ sleep habits.
With the recent glut of sleep products, a data dilemma has emerged: Which tool is telling the truth? “I know a few people who wear three or four trackers and spend a lot of time adjudicating the daily disagreements between their sleep trackers,” Huffington says. “That can’t be good for sleep.”
Andrew Zucker works at a television-production company in New York City
