‘Finally, I can tell you that I choose to go to the moon’

BILLIONAIRE, GORILLA BISCUITS FAN, ART COLLECTOR: MEET THE MAN WHO WILL TAKE MUSK’S ROCKET IN 2023

Last week, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa stood in front of a crowd of reporters at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and declared jubilantly, “Finally, I can tell you that I choose to go to the moon.”

And the 42-year-old announced he purchased not one but all the seats aboard SpaceX’s Big Falcon Rocket. Maezawa is not only a high-profile entrepreneur specialising in online retail and a world-famous art collector, but he is also set to be SpaceX’s first paying tourist to take a trip around the moon. Maezawa’s roughly week-long journey is tentatively scheduled for 2023.

“Ever since I was a kid, I have loved the moon,” he said during a news conference. “Just staring at the moon filled my imagination. It’s always there and has continued to inspire humanity. That is why I could not pass up this opportunity to see the moon up close.”

‘People think I’m a weirdo’

Clad in a dark blue blazer over a white graphic T-shirt, Maezawa, with a giant grin dominating his youthful features, looked more like a boy band member than a person ranked 18th on Forbes’ 2018 list of Japan’s 50 richest people. But anyone who has tracked his meteoric rise would know that being different is normal for a man whose life has been defined by surprising moments.

“Japanese people think I’m a weirdo,” Maezawa told British auction house Christie’s in 2017. “They say, who is this Maezawa person?”

To put it simply, Maezawa is a former punk rocker-turned-self-made e-commerce billionaire with a love of expensive art.

More than two decades ago, Maezawa, then just a sprightly teen, had an epiphany - he envisioned the rest of his life and was disheartened by what he foresaw.

At the time, he was a student at a prestigious feeder high school in Tokyo, which meant he was destined for university and after that a career, most likely in business.

“I could see the rails stretching in front of me - school, university, career. I could picture myself as one of those people jampacked in a rush-hour train. I wanted to derail myself,” he told the Times in London.