TOKYO: Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who blasts off for the International Space Station this week, is an irreverent space fanatic who has made headlines for splashing the money on fashionable artwork.
The 46-year-old tycoon is the founding father of Japan’s largest on-line vogue mall and is the nation’s Thirtieth-richest individual, in response to enterprise journal Forbes.
But he’s removed from the standard picture of a staid Japanese businessman, with greater than 10 million folks following his Twitter account, its deal with a play on his first title: @yousuck2020.
And he’s an enormous spender, notably in relation to his twin passions: fashionable artwork and space journey.
He hit the headlines in 2017 when he forked out a whopping US$110.5mil (RM466.75mil) for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 portray “Untitled”, a skull-like head in oil-stick, acrylic and spray paint on a large canvas.
It was a document worth, however Maezawa insists he’s simply an “ordinary collector” who buys items “simply because they are beautiful”.
On December 8, Maezawa will turn into the primary space vacationer to journey to the ISS with Russia’s space company Roscosmos since Canadian Guy Laliberte, co-founder of Cirque du Soleil, in 2009.
He can be accompanied on the 12-day mission by his assistant Yozo Hirano, a movie producer who can be documenting the journey for Maezawa’s YouTube channel and its 754,000 subscribers.
How a lot Maezawa has spent on his upcoming space journey is unclear, as the worth tag has been stored a secret, although comparable journeys have price hundreds of thousands of {dollars}.
But the price is unlikely to make a lot of a dent within the US$1.9bil (RM8.02bil) internet value Maezawa is estimated to have gathered by means of his agency Zozo, beforehand referred to as Start Today, which operates the vastly fashionable ZOZOTOWN on-line vogue website.
Maezawa arrived in Kazakhstan for space coaching in November, and has stated he’s “not afraid or worried” concerning the voyage.
‘Buy big dreams’
He has been soliciting concepts for issues he ought to do in space and asking questions together with: “Do you move forward when you fart in space? What happens when you play Pokémon GO in space?”
In Japan, Maezawa’s exploits are sometimes fodder for gossip magazines, with a specific deal with his love life over his space exploits.
The ISS journey received’t be Maezawa’s final space odyssey, because the businessman has additionally booked out a whole SpaceX rocket for a visit across the Moon scheduled for 2023 on the earliest.
Maezawa initially stated he deliberate to ask six to eight artists on the journey, asking them to create “masterpieces (that) will inspire the dreamer within all of us”.
But in March, he introduced he was broadening the search past artists, and claims to have obtained a million functions for eight spots on the rocket made by Elon Musk’s agency.
Maezawa has made a behavior of holding on-line competitions, making a Twitter frenzy in 2020 when he stated he would give away US$9mil (RM38.01mil) to 1,000 folks as a “social experiment”.
But he backed out of a separate competitors in search of candidates to be his girlfriend… after attracting almost 30,000 candidates.
As a younger man, Maezawa had aspirations within the music world and was a drummer with a band named Switch Style, which made its debut in 2000.
But he got here to really feel the enterprise world was extra artistic than music, and has stated writing and performing ultimately turn into a irritating routine.
He started dabbling in enterprise even earlier than the band’s debut, and has attributed Zozo’s success to the very fact he and his workers had been “doing what we enjoy”.
“Work hard, make people happy, earn money, buy big dreams, visit amazing places, meet people, experience great things, grow as a person, and work again,” he wrote in May on his Twitter account, explaining his philosophy.
“The cycle repeats. The cycle of making dreams come true. We can even go to space.” – AFP
