Meet billionaire Maezawa, SpaceX's first paying passenger to the moon

Maezawa has long stood out in the Japanese corporate world

In a country known for conformity, Yusaku Maezawa has always sought to stand out.

He skipped college, moved to California to play in a rock band and started his own company instead of landing a corporate job. The president of Start Today Co. is known for dropping hundreds of millions of dollars on artwork. Now, the billionaire founder of Japan’s second-largest e-commerce company is the first paying passenger to the moon on a rocket built by SpaceX, scheduled to blast off in 2023. It’s the latest headline-grabbing project by Maezawa, whose Twitter handle is @yousuck2020.

While Maezawa is relatively unknown outside the