Jared Isaacman

Origins and early life

Jared Isaacman is of Jewish descent and, in his own account, not religious, though he has given to a synagogue in his native New Jersey — the stated, sourced route by which he is here. He left Ridge High School at sixteen, took a GED, and founded from his parents' basement in 1999 the payments company that became Shift4; he later earned an aeronautics degree from Embry-Riddle online.

Work and career

In 2012 he co-founded Draken International, which flies one of the largest privately owned fighter fleets in the world to train NATO pilots. He has logged more than 7,000 flight hours and set a light-jet record for circling the globe in 2009, in 61 hours and 51 minutes. In September 2021 he commanded Inspiration4, the first orbital spaceflight with no professional astronaut aboard, which raised over $250 million for St.

Jude Children's Research Hospital. In September 2024 he led Polaris Dawn, which reached 1,400 kilometres — farther from Earth than anyone had gone since Apollo 17 — and on the twelfth he and Sarah Gillis opened the hatch and became the first private citizens to perform a spacewalk. He was nominated to lead NASA in December 2024, saw the nomination withdrawn in May 2025, was renominated that November, and was confirmed by the Senate on 17 December 2025 as the agency's fifteenth administrator.