Yusaku Maezawa please come forward.
Space X’s first moon tourist, the 43 year old Yusaku Maezawa, is an online retail tycoon
in Japan.
He’s also controversial, often portrayed negatively in Japanese media for flaunting
his wealth on social media.
And he likes to dabble.
He’s a punk rock drummer... turned entrepreneur billionaire... turned art collector...
turned moon tourist.
And his secret to success:
Work Less.
This is how Yusaku Maezawa made billions by dodging cultural norms in Japan, grabbing
publicity through outrageous purchases and stunts.
Maezawa’s recent purchase got him international attention for the first time:
A round trip ticket to the moon on Space X’s new rocket called "Starship", which is being
designed to colonize mars.
He is, I think, the bravest person and most willing to do so.
Although he wouldn’t disclose the price he’s paying for the ride, Elon Musk said
Yusaku is funding a material percentage of Starship's estimated $5 billion development cost.
At some point he began to talk with Elon Musk about traveling to outer space.
We don't know the exact timeline, but he is the first passenger, he will be the first
private citizen to fly.
Dubbed the dear moon project, Yusaku says he will take artists and musicians of his
choice to, in his words, “inspire world peace."
I do think this a really big publicity stunt for Zozo.
Zozo is Yusaku’s online clothing company.
It’s what’s made him a billionaire in his mid-30s.
Maezawa has said publicly, that he wants to become one of the top brands globally.
He expects to quintuple his market cap right now, to 50 billion dollars, within ten years.
And a lot of that will be driven by global expansion.
These ambitious plans are in contrast to his humble upbringing.
His dad was an accountant and his mom a housewife.
In a country known for conformity, Yusaku Maezawa has always sought to stand out.
It started in high school where he saw gloomy white collared workers, called “salarymen”
in Japan, commuting to work.
I always saw salarymen looking so unenthusiastic on the train.
That made me disheartened.
He skipped college, spent time in California
and later joined a punk rock band called Switch Style, which became popular within Japan.
When asked why he became a drummer, he said it's not so much that he loved playing on
the drums, it was just easier to join a band as a drummer, because drummers
were in higher demand.
You gotta start to see a pattern emerge that he's a commercially, kind of transactionally
driven person, even from an early age.
Shortly after joining the band, he started his company “Start Today” which sold imported
records via mail order in Japan.
Start Today became quite successful in selling records, and then moved on into clothes.
Yusaku was able to choose good music and good clothes to sell online, which is how the business
began to take off.
The online clothing website, called “Zozotown,” is now Japan’s go-to site for online fashion shopping.
In 2010 when profits started to really, really go up, and the company was approaching a billion
dollar market cap, he came out to an earnings press conference, in front of analysts and
investors, and he was dressed like a giant mushroom.
It was one of his first times to kind of grab the spotlight.
And his attention grabbing stunts have been getting increasingly controversial over the
past few years.
His social-media feeds are full of French wines, private jets, supercars, a Pablo Picasso
painting he purchased, and record-breaking works from American street artist
Jean Michel Basquiat.
The local media here is pretty relentless in how they attack him.
They say that he shows off his money, he stands for all the things that traditional Japanese
values, do not stand for.
Younger people generally love him.
They like someone who's open, they like that he's extremely active on social media.
Anytime I make a purchase, people just talk about the price and that I have so much money…
but in fact i’m buying the passion and the history.
Yusaku said he plans to make Zozo a leading global clothing brand within a decade by revolutionizing
how people buy clothes online, beginning with this year’s debut of a body-measuring outfit
called the Zozosuit.
The Zozosuit has allowed Maezawa to collect measurements of millions of people.
He says he can now predict the perfect clothing sizes from their sex, age, height and weight.
He plans to use that to become a world-leading clothing brand.
I mean not even Amazon has released anything like this, and they're the global e-commerce
leader and what better what to promote it than to jump on Elon Musk's rocket around
the moon so that everyone in the world knows who Yusaku Maezawa is?
In order to stay ahead of the curve, Zozotown is offering tech talent salaries of up to
100 million yen which is an unusual move in Japan, where workers often take lower pay
in exchange for secure employment.
He’s also encouraging employees to condense work and spend more time outside the office
pursuing all kinds of intellectual and artistic pursuits.
I think Yusaku's secret is that he knows what people want.
He just kind of gets it.
Whether Zozotown’s new technology revolutionizes the way we shop online or not, the world will
have its eyes on Yusaku and Elon Musk in 2023, which is the estimated travel date for the
first ever tourist trip to the moon.
As far as me going, I’m not sure…
Maybe we’ll both be on it.