Yusaku Maewaza, creator of Japan’s largest online clothing store, buys eight seats on the lunar expedition that Space X, Elon Musk, prepares for 2023. Former drummer of a rock band and obsessive record collector, he paid 95 million euros for a painting by Basquiat last year. Japan is the culture of respect for the elderly, of homogeneity, of lack of creativity, of obedience to hierarchies. Or that’s what we thought. Until one looks at Yusaku Maezawa. His biography would fit us better if he had been born in Burbank, in the state of California, instead of in Kamaguya, in Chiba Prefecture. Former drummer of a rock group, collector, first, of records, and, later, of art – a year ago he paid 95 million euros for a painting by Basquiat -, and, above all, an entrepreneur, Maezawa is on track to fulfill 43 years in two months with some records to his credit, including being the creator of the largest online clothing store in Japan, Zozo, and having popularized an ingenious online system to measure the body of customers and, incidentally, leaving many tailors without employment, since according to these data the user can then buy the clothes that he wants on the Internet.
And, now, Maezawa has become the first man who, theoretically, will reach the orbit of the Moon in five years. It will be, if everything goes well, in 2023, in an expedition of the private company Space X, owned by Elon Musk. Not only that. Maezawa has purchased the 8 seats available, and plans to take a group of artists with him. “I have decided to go to the Moon with artists,” Maezawa said Monday, announcing his decision. Thus, in 2023 a kind of Renaissance ship may pass through interstellar space, or, perhaps, a fairground, because the entrepreneur has already declared that he wants to put painters, musicians, photographers, film directors in lunar orbit. , clothing designers, architects and, most surprisingly – because in space gravity is zero – dancers. He has not yet decided who, so the ban is open to convince the one who is already the fourteenth richest person in Japan, according to the financial magazine Forbes, with an estimated equity of 2,700 million dollars (2,300 million euros). And, for the most part, that fortune has been made selling clothes online. Maezawa is a kind of online Amancio Ortega from the Far East. Although there are no similarities.
