Who is Jared Isaacman? The billionaire pilot who just completed the first private spacewalk with SpaceX

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“SpaceX, back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world.”

The words uttered by Jared Isaacman as he stepped out on the world’s first commercial spacewalk might not join similar phrases spoken by astronauts: they are unlikely to join the ranks of “one small step for a man” or “Houston, we’ve had a problem”.

But Mr Isaacman – like Neil Armstrong and Jack Swigert before him – will go down in history as a pioneer of humanity’s exploration of space. His mission is unlike theirs in many ways, but he too is now a pioneer.

Jared Isaacman was already a funder and participant in the first fully commercial spaceflight, in SpaceX’s Inspiration4 mission in 2021. He was launched into orbit, flew for three days and then splashed down into the ocean.

But now he is also the first ever person to take part in a commercial spacewalk, as part of the Polaris Dawn mission this week. That saw him shot into space, up to heights of 1,400km away from the Earth, and then conduct a spacewalk – which is more formally referred to as extravehicular activity, or EVA – from the SpaceX capsule that carried him there.

Mr Isaacman did not get into space like those other pioneers that went before him. His space career did not come after a glittering career in the air force or as a scientist, for instance.

Instead, his journey into space really starts when he was just 16, in 1999, when as a high-school dropout he founded a company then called United Bank Card and began life as its chief executive.

He is still the CEO of that company. But it has changed dramatically: now known as Shift4 Payments and calling itself a “global leader in financial technology”, it processes more than 260 billion dollars in payments each year, it says, and it has made Mr Isaacman a billionaire.

He took the company public in 2020. His net worth is now thought to be more than $2 billion.

The money from that success has taken Mr Isaacman repeatedly to the skies. He is qualified to fly aircraft including military jets, and has set record in them for travelling around the world.

He has also combined those interests. As well as running Shift4, he founded Drake International, which leases fighter jets that previously flew with the military.

But much of the world came to know Mr Isaacman in 2021, when he announced his Inspiration4 mission with SpaceX. While he paid for the trip, he gave away the other three seats in the craft: one went to professor and science communicator Sian Proctor, one to healthcare worker and cancer survivor Hayley Arceneaux and another went to Christopher Sembroski, whose friend won the seat in a charity raffle but had to give it away because he did not satisfy the weight restrictions.

SpaceX does not disclose what it charges for its space tourism trips, and Mr Isaacman has not said how much he has spent on the journeys. But it is likely to be in the hundreds of millions.

Mr Isaacman has used the trips not only to bolster his flight credentials, but also as charity exercises. Inspiration4 raised more than $250 million for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

He still lives in New Jersey – where he grew up – with his wife and two daughters. His partner, Monica, grew up in the same town – and seemingly shares his interest in flying and other daredevil pursuits, though she has not yet taken part in a mission to space.