Billionaire plans art trip to moon
Entrepreneur aims to be Musk’s first paying passenger.
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 e-commerce company. After making it big, the 42-yearold started dropping hundreds of millions of dollars on artwork. Now the billionaire founder of Start Today Co. 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 headline-grabbing project by Maezawa, whose Twitter handle is @yousuck2020.
While Maezawa is relatively unknown outside the archipelago 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. A self-professed art lover, the Japanese entrepreneur intends to take a combination of painters, musicians, dancers, photographers, film directors, fashion designers and architects on a weeklong 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 Corp.’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, sitting next to the rocket company’s CEO, Elon Musk. “I choose to go to the moon with artists.”
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 $2.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Maezawa made a splash in the art world in 2017 when he spent $110.5 million on a single Jean-Michel Basquiat painting at a Sotheby’s auction, setting a record for an American artist’s work at the time. By then, Maezawa had already bought several Basquiat pieces.
Maezawa has funded his art binge by selling shares in the company he founded. He sold about $250 million 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 23 billion yen ($205 million) worth of the company’s shares. He has not announced major art purchases so far this year, suggesting at least some of the funds may have been used to participate in Musk’s mission.
“I love art, so I want to see what artists will collaborate on together and see it directly with my eyes,” Maezawa said.
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.