Billionaire Jared Isaacman has made history in space – again.

On Thursday, Isaacman floated outside a SpaceX capsule in the vacuum of space for 10 minutes. Isaacman, the billionaire CEO and founder of payment processing company Shift4 Payments, is part of the first all-civilian spacewalk – three years after leading a SpaceX mission in 2021 as commander of the world’s first all-civilian mission to reach orbit.

Both private space missions were funded with undisclosed sums by Isaacman, who has an estimated net worth of $1.9 billion, according to Forbes.

“I decided to go to space when I was 5 years old. I planned it pretty thoroughly back then, it just took me a while to put it into action,” Isaacman told CNBC Make It in 2021.

Isaacman, 41, is an experienced pilot who set a world record for the fastest round-the-world flight in a light aircraft in 2009. He has long been a proponent of expanding the private space industry, which he believes could lead to a “world where anyone can go and venture to the stars.”

He went from being a teenage entrepreneur running a company he started in his parents’ basement in New Jersey to a billionaire floating in space.

As a teenager, Isaacman’s computer skills landed him a job as an IT consultant at a payment processing company, which led him to drop out of high school. Within months, the 16-year-old decided to start a competing company, simplifying his customers’ lives by allowing them to fill out their applications online.

He used a $10,000 check from his grandfather as start-up capital and opened a shop in the basement of his parents’ house. “$10,000 was enough to build a couple of computers,” Isaacman said. “It wasn’t expensive. And you needed a couple of phones, and that was enough to get started.”

His first employees included his friend Brendan Lauber, who was Shift4’s chief technology officer until last year, and Isaacman’s father, a salesman who had previously worked for a private security firm.

Shift4 went public in June 2020 and had a market value of $7.4 billion as of Friday afternoon. The company is based in a 75,000-square-foot headquarters in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, and employs over 2,000 people across the country.

“At that age, you just can’t imagine” that the company could be worth billions, Isaacman said. “One of the best times at a startup is when you have the eight people in the basement, eating Chinese food and everyone is sharing their knowledge, you share in each other’s successes and failures and you learn together.”

Constantly working to get his business off the ground at such a young age, Isaacman was close to burnout. Isaacman has always been an airplane enthusiast and began taking flying lessons in his twenties to let off steam.

In 2009, Isaacman set a world record by flying around the world in a Cessna Citation CJ2 in just under 62 hours – about 20 hours less than the previous record holder. Three years later, he founded Draken International, a company that trains student pilots for the U.S. Air Force. According to Forbes, he sold it to investment firm Blackstone Group in 2020 for “nine figures.”

As the private space industry grew, Isaacman looked for ways to take his flying hobby to new levels. He says, “Probably starting in 2007, I started knocking on the doors of SpaceX and a few other (private space companies) and expressing my interest, like, ‘Hey, if it ever happens, come see me.'”

The opportunity came in 2021, when he spent three days in orbit as commander of a four-person crew. During his five-day trip this week, he was allowed to put on a spacesuit and exit the capsule.

“As far as I’m concerned, I’ve been very lucky in life,” Isaacman told Bloomberg before the spacewalk. “You know, a teenager who started a startup in the basement, just trying to buy pizza on the weekends, and it turned into a real empire.”

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