FLY ME TO THE MOON
Meet Elon Musk’s first lunar tourist
● In a country known for conformity, Yusaku Maezawa has always sought to stand out. He skipped college, moved to California to play in a rock band and started his own ecommerce company. After making it big, the 42-year-old started dropping hundreds of millions of dollars on artwork.
Now the billionaire founder of Start Today is set to become the first paying passenger to the moon on a SpaceX rocket scheduled to blast off in 2023. It’s the latest headlinegrabbing project by Maezawa, whose Twitter handle is @yousuck2020.
While Maezawa is relatively unknown outside Japan and the art world, he’s guaranteed to become more famous with his plan to fly to Earth’s biggest satellite with a cabal of artists.
The Japanese entrepreneur intends to take a combination of painters, musicians, dancers, photographers, film directors, fashion designers and architects on a week-long lunar loop, where he’ll get to watch as they get inspired and create art along the way.
“I thought long and hard about how valuable it would be to be the first passenger to the moon,” Maezawa said at an announcement at Space Exploration Technologies’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, sitting next to the rocket company’s CEO, Elon Musk.
The flight around the moon is a marriage of Maezawa’s diverse interests: to be a visionary, to support art and to promote his company. Taking the enormous personal risk of orbiting the moon as the first private citizen would cement him in history books. Maezawa said he hopes the art created during the trip will inspire more interest and support for artists.
Maezawa and Musk declined to say how much the lunar trip would cost.
“This is not us choosing him,” Musk said. “He chose us. He is a very brave person to do this.”
Maezawa made a name and fortune for himself by defying the norms of Japanese society. A former drummer in a rock band, he built shopping website Zozotown, a popular destination for younger consumers, from a mail-order music album business.
With a net worth of $2.3bn (about R47billion), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Maezawa made a splash in the art world in 2017 when he spent $110.5m on a single Jean-Michel Basquiat painting at a Sotheby’s auction, setting a record for an American artist’s work at the time.
It’s not us choosing him. He chose us. He is a very brave person to do this
Elon Musk
Space Exploration Technologies CEO
Maezawa has funded his art binge by selling shares in the company he founded. He sold about $250m worth of stock in 2016 and used most of it to add to his art collection over the following two years. In May, Start Today said he had sold about $205m worth of the company’s shares.
“I love art, so I want to see what artists will collaborate on together and see it directly with my eyes,” Maezawa said.
Maezawa has long stood out in the Japanese corporate world, where executives maintain low-key lifestyles and keep out of the spotlight, the billionaire is active on social media, sharing snippets from lavish meals or vacations, and regularly makes headlines in the Japanese entertainment world for dating young, popular actresses.
Maezawa first mentioned in a Twitter post in 2015 that his “eyes were opened” after touring Nasa and talking to astronauts. A year later, he told Japan’s Newspicks online magazine he wanted to try his hand in space. In April, he tweeted that space is one of his main “hobbies”, along with art and wine.
“Ever since I was a kid, I have loved the moon,” Maezawa said. “Just staring at the moon filled my imagination. It’s always there and has continued to inspire humanity. That’s why I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to see the moon up close.”
Building on the success of Start Today’s Zozo brand, Maezawa intends to turn his company into a global retailer, with the goal of being one of the world’s top 10 clothiers within a decade.
In an interview with Bloomberg News in July, Maezawa talked about his love for making things. Maezawa didn’t attend college, instead moving to California to play in a band after high school. The experience inspired the beginnings of the business of Start Today — named after an album by the punk band Gorilla Biscuits — as he began to sell music CDs in Japan.
“No matter what, I wanted to do different things compared to other people,” Maezawa said. — Bloomberg