Shift4 CEO Jared Isaacman worked two jobs to become a civilian astronaut

Billionaire Jared Isaacman spent two and a half years training for a historic 10-minute spacewalk, while simultaneously running a company worth about $8 billion.

Isaacman, 41, funded and led SpaceX’s mission last month that included the first all-civilian spacewalk, during which he personally flew outside a Dragon space capsule. He’s also the CEO of payment processing company Shift4 Payments, which he founded in his parents’ basement in 1999 and whose market cap has grown to $7.86 billion, as of Thursday morning.

“I’ve had two parallel careers my entire adult life, between what I do at my day job at Shift4 and my aviation career,” Isaacman tells CNBC Make It.

As a CEO and father of two, Isaacman doesn’t have a lot of free time — and his duties at Shift4 require “the vast majority of my time and energy,” he says. However, for the past two years, he spent most of his free time preparing for a five-day trip that took him and his three crew members Farther from the ground More than any human being has traveled in five decades.

Isaacman, whose estimated net worth is $1.5 billionHe says he did not take any leave during those two years of training. He adds that he “remained very involved” in Shift4’s day-to-day operations throughout that period, a period that saw the company make several large acquisitions, including the purchase of point-of-sale systems company Revel Systems. $250 million in May.

“It’s a balance,” says Isaacman. “I eat a lot in my sleep. So, there are a lot of nights and weekends spent at SpaceX…the only time I was legitimately offline was about five or six days.” [during the mission]”.

The flight was Isaacman’s second space venture: in 2021, he funded and led a SpaceX team that became the world’s first civilian crew to reach orbit. This time, his training was more intense, involving preparation and emergency work for deep space issues such as high radiation, micrometeorites and orbital debris.

Isaacman and the crew also tested different iterations of SpaceX’s EVA spacesuits — “different joints, different rotors, different stitching for the fingers,” he says — and practiced the spacewalk itself, before actually doing it roughly 800 miles above the Earth’s surface.

“What if you can’t recompress the car? How can you get home in these conditions?” Isaacman says. “There are always things that pop up. I don’t know if [there’s] “It has been the quintessential human spaceflight mission of the last 60 years.”

Once in space, the crew worked around the clock, conducting dozens of research experiments in five days while monitoring the capsule and its systems. Isaacman says he only got “a handful of hours” of sleep throughout the five-day mission, calling it a “major sleep deprivation event” for him and his crewmates.

He says Isaacman’s day job was the furthest thing from his mind while he was in space. Shortly after returning to solid ground, he returned to work.

“Within 48 hours of returning to Earth, I arrived at an investor event in… [Los Angeles]”says Isaacman.

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