According to Taylor, you could be commuting to the moon within a decade. 

“Humans will definitely be living and working in space,” the billionaire space exec exclusively told Fortune. 

“The next step would be the moon. That’ll happen in the 2030s—probably early 2030s,” Taylor added. “We’ll have a moon base, people living and working on the moon. You’ll be able to look up at the moon and see lights on the moon.”

Technically, Taylor points out that a tiny portion of humanity is already working in space at the International Space Station, which has had “humans continuously up there for 26 years.” But the CEO added that the industry is “working actively” on scaling that up from a handful of trained astronauts to the general population.

As for what jobs will eventually exist up there? Taylor points to resource mining, orbital data centers, and power grid construction—work he doesn’t think humanoid robots can fully replace. “You’re not going to be able to program Optimus to do everything on the moon,” he added. “You’re going to have to have humans to figure it out.”

Unlike the moon, Mars is humanity’s backup plan—not its new home

Taylor isn’t just speculating from the sidelines. Despite making millions before even 30 and running public companies across electronics, finance, banking, and real estate, he started again at 37 to chase his childhood dream: working in space. 

In 2007, Taylor became an angel investor in Space Adventures. He was also an early investor in Relativity Space, along with Mark Cuban. In 2017, he founded his first space venture, Space For Humanity, a nonprofit that plans to purchase seats on commercial spaceflight for people who wouldn’t typically have access. And then two years later founded Voyager—and that bet paid off last year, when the company went public on the NYSE, hitting a $3.8 billion valuation, and turning Taylor into a billionaire at 53. Fortune reviewed a summary of his financial records, which verifies his billionaire status.

Voyager is now building the replacement for the International Space Station and holds multiple NASA contracts. Taylor himself has even flown to space on a 2021 Blue Origin flight—and became the 606th human to go to space.

But Mars, he said, is a different story entirely: “Just because it’s so much further away. Radiation is so much more of a bigger problem.” 

For the majority of us regular folk, Taylor doesn’t see Mars becoming our new home—unless a major catastrophe hits Earth. “I agree with Elon (Musk) that we want to have some diversification, in case something really bad happens here—an asteroid or something like that,” he explained. “The moon really isn’t sufficient diversification. The moon and the Earth are really the same planetary system.” 

Who actually goes, he says, will mostly come down to who wants to. 

“A lot of people don’t want to live on Mars,” he said, adding that he’s not one of them. “I’d rather do the adventure. We’re all on a one-way trip, whether we know it or not. It’s just where you want to end up.”

And he believes enough people think like him that you could eventually end up with a town or city on the Red Planet.

“They have the adventurer gene, which I think I have,” Taylor added. “There’s enough people that would do that that you could start a small colony—but this whole notion that we can create an entire civilization, terraform ours, it’s going to take a long time to do that.”

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman have made similar predictions about space and work

It’s not just Taylor who’s predicted that you could be applying for jobs and a mortgage from another planet in the future.

Musk, Tesla CEO and the richest person on the planet, has single-handedly been one of the most influential leaders in pushing for 21st-century space accessibility. After all, he’s the cofounder and CEO of $1.8 trillion SpaceX, which has worked hand in hand with NASA to advance space exploration. He thinks humans will be on Mars as soon as 2028—but it’s worth noting his past predictions haven’t always hit the mark. In 2016, Musk said he wanted to send humans to Mars by 2024, but it didn’t happen.

Bezos, meanwhile, has predicted that by 2045, “millions of people” will be living in space—and robots will commute on our behalf to the moon.

“I don’t see how anybody can be discouraged who is alive right now,” the Amazon and Blue Origin founder said on stage at Italian Tech Week 2025. “If you need to do some work on the surface of the moon or anywhere else, we will be able to send robots to do that work.”

And in less than 10 years’ time, OpenAI’s CEO Altman says college graduates will be working “some completely new, exciting, super well-paid” job in space. The ChatGPT creator even said that he’s jealous of young people because his generation’s early-career jobs will look “boring” and “old” by comparison.