Jared Isaacman was once a Jewish high school dropout living in his parents’ basement in New Jersey before becoming a tech billionaire — and now a space tourist preparing for the first private spacewalk in history.
Isaacman, 41, who launched Tuesday for his latest record-breaking venture into space, spent his school days at Ridge High School dreaming of bigger things rather than focusing on his classes.
“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.” Instead of staying in a place where he was unhappy, Isaacman made a bold choice. He dropped out of high school at 16 in 1999 and founded Shift4 Payments, a payment-processing company, while living in his parents’ basement in Far Hills.
Although Isaacman recalled working grueling hours — from 7:30 a.m. to as late as 3 a.m. behind his computer — his gamble paid off. Shift4 grew rapidly and today processes more than $260 billion in payments annually for over 200,000 customers across the US, Canada, Japan, and Europe.
In 2020, Isaacman’s fortune skyrocketed when he took Shift4 public, retaining 38% of the company stock. His net worth jumped to $2.3 billion, according to Forbes.
However, his success wasn’t solely due to Shift4. In 2011, Isaacman founded Draken International, a defense company that trains U.S. Air Force pilots.
After reaching billionaire status, Isaacman sought new heights—literally. In 2021, he funded and led the first civilian mission to space aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. The three-day trip, estimated to cost $200 million, made history by becoming the first space mission without a professional astronaut aboard.
Since that groundbreaking mission, Isaacman has secured three more space trips from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. His current five-day trip, part of the Polaris Dawn mission which launched Tuesday, will take Isaacman and his crew farther than the International Space Station—surpassing the orbital record set by NASA’s Project Gemini in 1966 at an altitude of 870 miles.
* The New York Post contributed to this article.
