Who is Jared Isaacman? NJ high school dropout-turned-tech billionaire to conduct first private spacewalk in history
Jared Isaacman was just a high school dropout living in his parents’ basement in New Jersey before he became a tech billionaire — and now a space tourist set to conduct the first private spacewalk in history.
Isaacman, 41, who blasted off Tuesday for his latest record-breaking venture into space, always appeared to have his head in the clouds while attending Ridge High School, often dreaming o൲f greater things rather than focusing on his cܫlasses.
“I was a horrible student,” Isaacman admitted in the Netflix docuseries “Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space.” “And I wasn’t, like, happy in school, either.”
Rather than be miserable, Isaacman opted to take a gamble and dropped out of high school at age 16 in 1999 to found Shift4 Payments, a payment-processing firm, while living in his parents’ basement in Far Hills.
The computer-whiz saidﷺ he got the idea for the company when he was 15 years old and working for a local payment-processing firm, where he learned how complicated it was back then for businesses to get and set up credit-card readers, .
Isaacman’s company, originally dubbed United Bank Card, sought to make the process more seamless and cheaper for all the businesses looking to enter the 21 century.
While Isaacman lamented in the Netflix documentary that he would work from 7:30 a.m to as late as 3 a.m. bꦅehind a keyboard, his payment-pꦉrocessing company eventually flourished, becoming a favorite among restaurants and hotels across the nation.
Today, Shift4 handles more than $260 billion in payments every year for its more than 200,000 customers across the US, Canada, Japan andജ Europe♛.
Isaacman became a billionaire after he took Shift4 public in 2020, with his retention of 38% of the company stock skyrocketing his net worth to $ꦕ2.3 billion, according to Forbes.
But Isaacman’s money wasn’t solely made through his payment-processing company’s success. In 2011, he founded Draken International, a defense firm that trains US Air Force pilots.
The company eventually grew into the world’s largest private fleet of military aircraft.
The venture was brought forth by Isaacman’s love of flying, with the busy tech CEO finding a break in the early 2000s to attend flight school.
While he initially stuck to prop planes, Isaacman eventually moved up to jets, and in 2009, he completedဣ the fastest trip around the world in a light jet, taking off from and returning to Morristown, NJ, within 61 hours and 51 minutes.
His record was more than a third — or about 21 hours — faster than the previous one set in 1991, .
The flight, and the failed one before it, raised more than $100,000 for the Make-A-Wish-Foundation, something that would become a pattern for the billionaire, who vowed to donate half his wealth as part of Bill Gates’ Giving Pledge mission.
As he was preparing for Shift4’s IPO, Isaacman would eventually sell a majority stake in Draken to Blackstone in 2019 for a nine-figure sum.
In the middle of his high-flying adventures, Isaacman marriꦓed his wife, Monica, who grew up in the same town. The couple still live in New꧑ Jersey with their two daughters.
After achieving the status of billionaire, Isaacman sought to take his aireborn trips even further by funding and leading the first civilian mission to space aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.
The three-day trip to space was , with Isaacman setting 🅠a record by being the first space tourist to circle the Earth without having a professional astronaut aboard.
Since then, Isaac♋man purchased a total of three trips to return to space from Elon Musk, with the first taking off Tuesday morning.
The five-day trip will see Isaacman and three crew members go further beyond the International Space Station — which orbits at an altitude of 870 miles — surpassing the Earth-lapping record set during NASA’s Project Gemini in 1966.
Only th🌳e 24 Apollo mission astronauts who flew to the moon have vಌentured farther into space.
Isaacman will then become the first person to conduct a private spacewalk as he is scheduled to pop out of the Dragon capsule for a two-hour mission, which will also test SpaceX’s latest suits.
The daredevil billionaire said he was ecstatic about the trip before launch, as he hopes to൲ help pioneer a new era of human space exploration.
“I wasn’t alive when huಌmans walked on the moon. I’d certainly like my kids to see humans walking on the moon and Mars and venturing out and exploring our solar system,” Isaccman said.
With Post wires
