In fact, Mario Parisi and my father are probably the two most inspirational figures when it comes to my growth as a company leader.Collection: Inspirational
Using the bathroom in space is hard, and you've got to be very - what was the word? - very kind to one another.Collection: Space
I came back to Earth with a house full of COVID.
Square essentially targeted consumers who were doing peer-to-peer transactions. They made it easy for personal trainers to charge their clients or for a guy to sell his golf clubs to his buddy.
We own the world's largest private air force; it's 80 fighter jets.
I did tell my kindergarten teacher I would go to space someday, and she said she'd be watching.
Square has already found that the micro-merchant market isn't a profitable business, and as a result they have been trying to shift into the more lucrative small business market.
I hated high school. I watched my older siblings out in the world and they seemed to be having a much better time than me. I could not wait to be an adult.
I think any pilot with my kind of background, flying ex-military-type aircraft and experimental aircraft, would say that the pinnacle is to be able to pilot a spacecraft - there's no question.
SpaceX's goal to make life multiplanetary and get us to Mars and be able to stay there makes the Manhattan Project look small in comparison.
United Bank Card, I picked that name in 1999 because it sounded like an established financial institution, and I was 16 years old in my parents' basement, so I needed a name like that. The moment we started building our own hardware and software and had our point-of-sale capabilities by 2008, that was the last message we wanted to send.
I didn't want to be just a weekend warrior and go up and fly every now and then.
To sign up to take credit cards 21 years ago, it was the same amount of paperwork as getting a commercial mortgage. It was very intense, it was burdensome, it was entirely unnecessary.
Shift4 has always been the greater portion of my time commitment.
You only get so many flight hours. It's not a whole lot of time, so it really just comes down to maximizing it while you can.
I didn't really come out and expose my age.
The odds of becoming a NASA astronaut - you have a better chance of getting hit by lightning.
Who hasn't imagined themselves cruising around in an X-wing?
I've been very lucky in life; you really don't get to a position that I'm fortunate enough to be in without the ball bouncing your way a couple times.
I've said it really from the beginning that the stars have always aligned with Inspiration4.
SpaceX is not going to put us up into orbital spaceflight unprepared.
I've been flying high-performance aircraft for a really long time.
We care about this not being a world where 600 people have gotten on orbit; we want it to be 600,000.
Inspiration4 is the realization of a lifelong dream and a step towards a future in which anyone can venture out and explore the stars.
My parents wanted to make sure I at least had the high school diploma, so I got a GED.
One of the best times at a start-up is when you've got the eight people in the basement eating Chinese food and everybody kind of shares knowledge, and you share in your successes and failures together, and you learn together.
As soon as I got my business going, after a couple of years it was pretty much consuming my whole life.
If you do believe there's going to be a world like The Jetsons,' where everybody jumps in their rocket - very Star Wars' or Star Trek' - and people are exploring new planets and new worlds, then we've got to get the first one right.
I've obviously been an aviation, space enthusiast for a long time.
I've been fortunate throughout many moments in my career, and whether that was traveling to Antarctica just a year ago on a mountain-climbing expedition or flying in air shows or world-record flights. These are all significant moments that I try to reflect on.
I certainly like to go out and seek out interesting challenges, and I try to highlight a very worthwhile cause and make a positive impact along the way.
Space adaptation syndrome is certainly real.
Obviously you're looking out the window and you're seeing Earth and that's moving and then you're in a spacecraft now that can move on all axes while you're floating inside it and I think, for some people, maybe the combination of all three is a little bit of a sensory overload.
It sounds loud, but what you're hearing is the turbo pumps driving at max performance. Once you're going past the speed of sound it's really what is on the vehicle that you're hearing.
At stage separation, before the second motor ignites, to me it was a huge unload. You're practically at a zero-G event at that moment. It's the same thing when you get on orbit, except that it never starts up again. It's continuous. And the best way to describe that would be hanging upside down from your bed, like your head fills with blood.
We want to work towards a Jetsons-like world.
If you're going to accomplish all those great things out in space, all that progress, then you have an obligation to do some considerable good here on Earth, like making sure you conquer childhood cancer along the way.
I've been a SpaceX fanboy for a long time.
I've been a space enthusiast since I was in kindergarten.
I could have just invited a bunch of my pilot buddies to go, and we would have had a great time and come back and had a bunch of cocktails. Instead, we wanted to bring in everyday people and energize everyone else around the idea of opening up spaceflight to more and more of us.
There's always a risk that something goes wrong, like a structural failure. But you have confidence in the whole system and the measures that have gone into place to minimize the risk. Sometimes you land when your knees are clanking together and you say you're lucky to be alive. But you are - and you move on.
I mean, watching any rocket go up is pretty incredible, but watching a Soyuz go up is something else.
If you're at Kennedy Space Center, the closest you're going to get to a rocket going off is like three and a half miles.
I truly want us to live in a world 50 or 100 years from now where people are jumping in their rockets like the Jetsons and there are families bouncing around on the moon with their kid in a spacesuit.
We've got to go back to the space station and back to the moon and Mars and beyond, because there is a lot of space out there and we know so little about it.
I grew up in a very middle-class background. It was a place where if you wanted something, you worked to get it.
We have so much Apple influence in what we do, because we love Apple. We don't want to use their products necessarily, but we want to think in design terms the way they do.
Our first two weeks at SpaceX, we've got about 3,000 pages of academic material dropped on us, and it was just kind of death by PowerPoint, over and over, until you absorb it all.
SpaceX returned human spaceflight to the United States, and no one is close to doing that other than them.
I certainly get a lot of people who ask me about what it's like at SpaceX, and have you learned from it, and are there things you're taking away that you apply to your own business. The answer to all those is yes.