Japanese online retail fashion tycoon Yusaku Maezawa will conduct the «social experiment» in a serious attempt to observe if the payments boost happiness.
1,000 individuals randomly selected amongst his Twitter followers who retweeted a January 1 post will each receive 10 million yen ($9,157), according to Maezawa’s YouTube post. The founder of Japan’s largest online retail fashion platform, ZOZO, said he hoped the exercise would draw interest from academics and economists.
According to Maezawa, the experiment intends to mirror the social policy concept of periodic no-strings-attached payments to all citizens – with backing from the likes of U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Maezawa added that he felt obliged to run such an experiment and inspire greater debate over the merits of such a policy as he «has the money and free time» to make such payments.
«It's a serious social experiment,» he said in the video.
Passion
Maezawa, estimated to have a $2 billion net worth, is renowned for chasing his passions and interests with relatively limited restraint. In 2017, he reportedly spent $110.5 million on a 1982 Jean-Michel Basquiat painting «Untitled» – an amount which would break his last record set in May 2016 when he paid $57 million for another untitled Basquiat.
His chase extends beyond art and luxury to the adventurous as Maezawa in line to be the first private passenger to fly around the moon with Elon Musk's SpaceX. On the political front, Maezawa also expresses greater adventurism, using his platform to consider ideas not only like basic income theory but also a world without money.
