Anish Moonka@anishmoonka
Jared Isaacman dropped out of high school at 16 and started a company in his parents' basement with $10,000 his grandfather gave him. Tonight he's on the deck of a Navy ship, waiting to welcome four astronauts home from the moon.
That basement company is now Shift4 Payments. It processes over $200 billion a year in credit card transactions, about a third of all restaurants, hotels, and casinos in the U.S. Went public in 2020. He ran it as CEO from age 16 until he stepped down to take over NASA last year.
He also co-founded Draken International, which ran a fleet of over 100 retired fighter jets whose entire job was playing the enemy in combat training for U.S. Air Force and NATO pilots. He sold it to Blackstone for over $100 million.
He has over 8,000 hours in the cockpit and can fly more than a dozen types of military jets. He personally owns a MiG-29, a Russian fighter that tops 1,500 mph, which he bought from the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It's the only one in private American hands. In 2009, he flew around the entire planet in a small Cessna jet in 61 hours and 51 minutes, a world record, to raise money for Make-A-Wish.
In 2021, he paid for and commanded Inspiration4, the first all-civilian spaceflight. Four people with no astronaut training, three days orbiting Earth, $250 million raised for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Then in 2024, he went back up on Polaris Dawn and floated outside the spacecraft, held to it by a 12-foot cable, in the first spacewalk ever done by someone outside a government space agency. That same flight reached 870 miles above Earth, farther than any human had been since the last Apollo crew in 1972.
He took over as NASA's 15th administrator in December 2025. In his first three months, he redirected $20 billion away from a planned space station around the moon and toward building a permanent base on the moon's surface.
Right now he's aboard the USS John P. Murtha, about 50 miles off San Diego. The capsule carrying the Artemis II crew is going to hit the atmosphere tonight at around 25,000 mph. If the heat shield holds (it took damage on its last unmanned test), if the parachutes open, four astronauts splash down at 8:07 PM ET after a 694,000-mile trip around the moon. And the person waiting for them has been to space twice, walked outside a spacecraft, owns the only Russian fighter jet in private American hands, and started his first company as a teenager in his parents' basement. His call sign is "Rook."
