A tech billionaire performed the first private spacewalk hundreds of miles above Earth on Thursday, a high-risk endeavor reserved for professional astronauts — until now.
New Jersey-born entrepreneur Jared Isaacman teamed up with SpaceX to test the company’s new spacesuits on his chartered flight. The daring spacewalk also saw SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis going out once Isaacman was safely back inside.
So who is Isaacman, and how’d he pull that off?
Isaacman, 41, CEO and founder of the Shift4 credit card-processing company, has declined to disclose how much he invested in the flight. It was the first of three flights in a program he’s dubbed Polaris; this one was called Polaris Dawn. For SpaceX’s inaugural private flight in 2021, he took up contest winners and a cancer survivor.
Until Thursday, only 263 people had conducted a spacewalk, representing 12 countries. The Soviet Union’s Alexei Leonov kicked it off in 1965, followed a few months later by NASA’s Ed White.
Isaacman started taking flying lessons in 2004 and set a world record for circumnavigating the globe five years later.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in professional aeronautics from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2011 and is a married dad to two daughters.
According to Forbes, Isaacman started Shift4 in the basement of his parents’ New Jersey home in 1999. He was 16 years old at the time. Shift4 handles payments for a third of America’s restaurants and hotels.
Isaacman took it public in June 2020 and owns 38% of the stock, according to Forbes.
In 2011, he started Draken International, a defense firm that boasts the globe’s largest private military aircraft fleet and trains Air Force pilots. He later sold a majority stake for a nine-figure sum, Forbes reports.
Isaacman is worth an estimated $1.9 billion.
