Jared Isaacman: Once a school dropout, now a billionaire and spacewalker

At the age of sixteen, Jared Isaacman dropped out of high school to found the payment processing startup Shift4 Payments. Once a homeless high school dropout who lived in his parents’ basement, Jared Isaacman is now a space enthusiast and tech billionaire. It is fascinating to see his amazing rise from modest origins to prominence in space exploration.

As part of the Polaris Dawn mission, Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, an engineer for SpaceX, recently finished a spacewalk to test new spacesuits. The fact that this five-day trip involved non-professional astronauts from a private corporation conducting an experiment in space for the first time made it noteworthy.

At the age of sixteen, Isaacman dropped out of high school to build Shift4 Payments, a payment processing startup. He started the business in his family’s basement with a $10,000 cheque from his grandfather.

Jared Isaacman: Entrepreneurial Success

Today, with a $7.4 billion valuation and more than 2,000 employees, Shift4 Payments is a significant player in its industry. “There’s no way, at that age, you could imagine the company would be worth billions,” Isaacman reminisced about the beginnings of the company. “Some of the best times were when it was just eight of us in the basement, sharing knowledge, Chinese food, and learning from both our successes and failures.”

Jared Isaacman’s success in business allowed him to explore his interest in space. He broke the record for the longest civilian spaceflight when he funded and oversaw the first voyage to orbit for civilians using SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.

He has accomplished more than just reaching space. By completing a circumnavigation of the earth in less than 62 hours in a Cessna Citation CJ2, Isaacman broke the previous record in 2009 by almost 20 hours. In addition, he established Draken International, which he later sold to Blackstone Group in 2020. Draken International trains student pilots for the United States Air Force.

Isaacman maintains his modesty despite his remarkable achievement. He said, “I feel incredibly lucky,” prior to his spacewalk. “I started out as a teenager in a basement, just trying to buy pizza for the weekend, and now it’s turned into quite the empire.”

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