Peter Diamandis

Peter Diamandis founded SEDS in October 1980 as a sophomore at MIT, frustrated by what he saw as a stagnating national space program. He wrote a letter to the editor of Omni magazine calling on students worldwide to get involved, and the response - chapters springing up at Princeton, Yale, and campuses across the country - became the seed of a movement. In 1982, Diamandis joined fellow students Bob Richards and Todd Hawley to formalize that movement as SEDS-USA, a national organization, at a conference held at George Washington University. He served as SEDS's first president.

Diamandis earned dual undergraduate degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT, followed by an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, training that reflected his early conviction that space, biotechnology, and human longevity were converging frontiers. In 1985, together with Richards and Hawley, he co-founded the Space Generation Foundation, and in 1987 the same trio founded the International Space University (ISU) in a meeting at MIT, an institution now training the next generation of space professionals across disciplines and nationalities.

Diamandis is best known today as the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which he launched in 1994 with the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE for private spaceflight and has since grown into a platform that has deployed more than $600 million across roughly 30 incentive competitions spanning space, health, environment, and AI. He also co-founded Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil in 2008, a Silicon Valley institution focused on exponential technologies, where he served as founding executive chairman. Over a career spanning more than 20 companies, Diamandis co-founded Zero Gravity Corporation, Planetary Resources (an asteroid-mining venture), Human Longevity Inc., and, more recently, Celularity and Fountain Life, both focused on longevity and preventive medicine, along with the venture fund BOLD Capital Partners.

He is a four-time New York Times bestselling author, with titles including Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (2012), Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World (2015), The Future Is Faster Than You Think (2020), and Life Force (2022, co-authored with Tony Robbins). He hosts the Moonshots podcast and runs Abundance360, a program for entrepreneurs and executives on exponential technology. Fortune has named him one of the "World's 50 Greatest Leaders."