Yusaku Maezawa

Maezawa began attending Waseda Jitsugyo High School, Tokyo, in 1991, where he started a hardcore punk band with his classmates called Switch Style, in which he was the drummer. The band released their first EP in 1993. After graduating from high school, he decided not to go to college; instead he moved to the US with a girlfriend, where he started collecting CDs and records. When he returned to Japan in 1995, his album collection became the basis for his first company, which sold imported albums and CDs through the mail.

In 1998, Maezawa used the basis of the mail-order album business to launch the company Start Today. The same year, his band signed with the label BMG Japan. By 2000, Start Today had moved to an online platform, had begun selling clothing, and had become a public company. In 2001, Maezawa declared a hiatus on his music career. Start Today opened the retail clothing website Zozotown in 2004, and six years later, Start Today became a publicly traded company, listed on the "Mothers" Index of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. By 2012, Start Today was listed in the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Forbes listed him in its World's Youngest Billionaires 2011 ranking, and Wealth-X for CNBC ranked him 8th richest entrepreneurs under 40 in Asia in 2015.

In 2018, Maezawa introduced Zozo, a custom-fit clothing brand and the Zozosuit an at-home measurement system, in over 72 countries and territories.

Maezawa resigned from Zozo in September 2019 after selling a stake of 50.1% in the company to SoftBank for US$3.7 billion (400 billion Yen). He also sold 30% of his personal stake in ZoZo to Yahoo Japan. In 2023, he invested $23 million in the satellite company Astroscale.

Maezawa is divorced, with three children, and lives in Chiba, Japan.

He commissioned his own Pagani Zonda, the Pagani Zonda ZoZo.

He is the owner of Nausicaä (previously project Cosmos), a 114 meter fuel-cell powered superyacht, built by Lürssen, designed by Marc Newson, and launched in August 2025.

Maezawa is the founder of the Tokyo-based Contemporary Art Foundation, which he started in 2012 with a goal of "supporting young artists as a pillar of the next generation of contemporary art." The Contemporary Art Foundation currently hosts collection shows twice a year. In May 2016, Maezawa attracted significant media attention with a record purchase price at auction of $57.3 million for an Untitled (1982) artwork of a devil by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and broke a record again in May 2017 with a $110.5 million auction for another Untitled (1982) of a skull by the same artist. At the same 2016 auction, Maezawa bought pieces by Bruce Nauman, Alexander Calder, Richard Prince, and Jeff Koons, spending a total of $98 million over two days. Maezawa plans to open a contemporary art museum in Chiba, which will house his collection. In 2022, Maezawa sold an untitled Basquiat Painting for $85 Million.