Tycoon throws trip out of orbit
Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa won’t be over the moon with anyone after all.
The e-commerce entrepreneur has abandoned his search for a girlfriend to join him on a lunar trip and canceled the TV show meant to document the adventure.
“Despite my genuine and honest determination toward the show, there was a part of me that still had mixed feelings about my participation,” Maezawa, 44, said in a series of Wednesday night tweets announcing his decision.
Maezawa solicited applications less than a month ago for a female companion to join him on the first-ever private flight to the moon. He was revealed in 2018 to be the first tourist ferried out of the atmosphere by SpaceX, the rocket company led by billionaire Tesla honcho Elon Musk.
Maezawa said thousands of women expressed interest in making the romantic journey, which he planned to chronicle in a series called “Full Moon Lovers” that was to be streamed by the Japanese Web site AbemaTV. He said his decision was based on “personal reasons” but did not specify what they were.
“To think that 27,722 women, with earnest intentions and courage, had used their precious time to apply makes me feel extremely remorseful to conclude and inform everyone with this selfish decision of mine,” Maezawa said on Twitter.
Maezawa is the founder of Zozotown, which calls itself Japan’s largest online fashion store.
He’s worth $2 billion and owns part of Zozo Inc., which serves as Zozotown’s publicly listed parent company, according to Forbes.
This isn’t the first time Maezawa has had to walk back a moon-shot plan. When he was Zozo’s CEO, he launched a product called the Zozosuit that was meant to help shoppers measure their bodies, but the failed project led the company to cut its profit outlook last year. Maezawa resigned as Zozo’s chief executive in September 2019, when Yahoo Japan took over the company.