How civilian astronaut Jared Isaacman built his billion-dollar business

Billionaire Jared Isaacman made history in space — again.

On Thursday, Isaacman spent 10 minutes floating in the vacuum of space outside of a SpaceX capsule. Isaacman, the billionaire CEO and founder of payment processing company Shift4 Payments, is part of the first-ever all-civilian spacewalk — three years after he led a 2021 SpaceX mission as commander of the world’s first all-civilian mission to reach orbit.

Both private space missions were funded for undisclosed sums by Isaacman, who boasts an estimated net worth of $1.9 billion, according to Forbes.

“I decided I was going to go to space when I was 5 [years old]. I was pretty calculated about it at that point, it just took me a little while to get it into motion,” Isaacman told CNBC Make It in 2021.

Isaacman, 41, is an accomplished pilot who set a world record in 2009 for the fastest around-the-world flight in a light jet. He’s a longtime advocate for the expansion of the private space industry, which he says could lead to “a world where everybody can go and venture among the stars.”

Here’s how he went from teenage entrepreneur, running a business he founded in his parents’ New Jersey basement, to a billionaire floating in space.

As a teenager, Isaacman’s computer skills helped him land an IT consulting job at a payment processing firm, causing him to drop out of high school. Within months, the 16-year-old decided to create a rival company, simplifying his clients’ experience by having business owners fill out their applications online.

He used a $10,000 check from his grandfather as seed money and set up shop in his childhood home’s basement. “$10,000, you know, you needed to build a couple of computers,” Isaacman said. “That wasn’t expensive. And, you needed some phones, and that was enough to get you going.”

His first employees included his friend Brendan Lauber, who was Shift4’s chief technology officer until last year, and Isaacman’s dad, a salesman who had previously worked for a home security company.

Shift4 went public in June 2020, and has a market value of $7.4 billion, as of Friday afternoon. It’s based out of a 75,000-square-foot headquarters in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, and the company has over 2,000 employees across the country.

“There’s just no way, at that age, you could ever imagine” the company becoming worth billions of dollars, said Isaacman. “One of the best times at a startup is when you’ve got the eight people in the basement eating Chinese food and everybody kind of shares knowledge, and you share in your successes and failures together, and you learn together.”

Working constantly to get his business off the ground, at such a young age, left Isaacman on the verge of early burnout. A lifelong plane enthusiast, Isaacman started taking flying lessons in his 20s to burn off some steam.

In 2009, Isaacman set a world record, flying around the word in a Cessna Citation CJ2 in just under 62 hours — about 20 fewer hours than the previous record-holder. Three years later, he founded Draken International, a company that trains student pilots for the U.S. Air Force. He sold it to investment firm Blackstone Group in 2020 for “a nine-figure sum,” according to Forbes.

As the private space industry grew, Isaacman watched opportunities to take his flying hobby to greater heights, he said: “Probably starting in 2007, I started banging on the door of SpaceX and some of the other [private aerospace companies] just expressing my interest that, you know, ‘Hey, if it ever comes to be, look me up.'”

The chance came in 2021, when he spent three days in orbit commanding a four-person crew. During his five-day trip this week, he got to don a spacesuit and leave the capsule.

“As far as I’m concerned, I’m super lucky in life,” Isaacman told Bloomberg, ahead of the spacewalk. “You know — teenage basement startup, just trying to buy pizza on the weekend, and it’s turned into quite the empire.”

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