Billionaire Yuri Milner Pledges $100 Million to Build Butterfly-Size Spaceships
Milner: Space Project May Find “Something Unexpected”
To those hoping that Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire who’s backed various Internet and space ventures, had called a press conference in New York to announce that his search for extraterrestrials had achieved contact: Prepare to be disappointed. No aliens have been found—yet.
While Milner’s Breakthrough Listen project has achieved no such breakthrough in the first few months of its existence, this has not deterred the 54-year-old technology entrepreneur and investor from continuing to commit portions of his fortune in service of quixotic aerospace research. Milner, along with the famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, is unveiled another wildly ambitious research project on Tuesday at an event at One World Trade Center.