Jeff Bezos said in high school he wanted everyone to leave Earth so he could make it a national park and idolizes Star Trek captain Jean-Luc Picard – but critic says his ambition to rule commerce is more like the Borg
- New report details Jeff Bezos’ obsession with colonizing space and Star Trek
- Reveals his quest to style himself as USS Enterprise-D Captain Jean-Luc Picard
- Bezos considered calling Amazon MakeItSo.com after Picard’s catchphrase
- Named his dog after Picard’s perfect but unattainable love interest Kamala
- Analyst says Amazon hopes to control virtually every transaction someday
- Writer Franklin Foer says Bezos ‘better resembles Picard’s archenemy, the Borg’
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has dreamed of populating the stars since high school, and idolizes Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation, according to a new report.
Bezos has invested billions in his aerospace company Blue Origin and his spacefaring ambitions are far from a secret. But a new article in The Atlantic reveals the depth of the obsession.
In his graduation speech as valedictorian of Miami Palmetto Senior High School’s class of 1982, Bezos proclaimed his vision was for millions of humans to relocate to colonies in space.
A local newspaper reported that his intention was ‘to get all people off the Earth and see it turned into a huge national park’.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (left) idolizes Captain Jean-Luc Picard (right) from Star Trek: The Next Generation, according to a new report
When reporters tracked down Bezos’s high-school girlfriend in recent years, she said, ‘The reason he’s earning so much money is to get to outer space.’
Bezos is also an unabashed fan of the many Star Trek series and films, and in particular Picard, the captain of the USS Enterprise-D, the Atlantic reports.
He initially considered naming Amazon MakeItSo.com, after Picard’s signature catchphrase. He has a holding company called Zefram, named after the the character who invented warp drive.
Bezos also named his dog Kamala, after a woman who appears in a TNG episode as Picard’s ‘perfect’ but unattainable mate.
He even persuaded the makers of the film Star Trek Beyond to give him a cameo as a Starfleet official.
Bezos has even adopted Picard’s look over the years, shaving his balding pate and sporting a gleaming chrome-dome.
With an overall net worth of about $114 billion, Bezos has funded Blue Origin by selling about $1 billion in Amazon stock a year, according to the Atlantic.
In May, he laid out his grand vision for humanity in an impassioned speech, showing concept art for space colonies that could house billions of humans.
Jeff Bezos, owner of Blue Origin, speaks about his dream of colonies in outer space in May
‘We can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization,’ he said.
Meanwhile, Amazon has expanded aggressively across many sectors of commercial life, and is simultaneously a retail, entertainment and cloud computing titan with increasing ties to the federal government, and its sights set on a massive new headquarters outside of Washington DC.
Tech analyst Ben Thompson, the founder of Stratechery, argues that Amazon’s master plan is to provide logistics ‘for basically everyone and everything’.
If everything flows through Amazon, the company will be positioned to collect a ‘tax’ on a stunning array of transactions, Thompson writes.
Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer says that ambitions like that conjure a different image from the Star Trek universe.
‘The man who styles himself as the heroic Jean-Luc Picard has thus built a business that better resembles Picard’s archenemy, the Borg,’ Foer writes, ‘a society-swallowing entity that informs victims, You will be assimilated and Resistance is futile.’
Picard is seen following his assimilation into the Borg collective in the season three finale. Writer Franklin Foer believes Amazon more closely resembles the Borg than Picard’s ideals