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(written from a Production point of view)

Jeffrey Preston "Jeff" Bezos, né Jorgensen (born 12 January 1964; age 60) is the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, and by extension of streaming service Prime Video as well.

Bezos had a cameo as an alien Starfleet official in Star Trek Beyond. [1] [2]

Besides Amazon, Bezos is also the founder of aerospace company Blue Origin, and has since become a major investor in Fandom, Memory Alpha's hosting company, as well. [3] As of 2023, he is the sixth richest person in the world, and had been the richest from 2017 to 2021. [4] [5]

USS Enterprise-A studio model in Blue Origin lobby

The lobby of Blue Origin with the Enterprise studio model

A die-hard Trekkie, Bezos played Star Trek games as a child and has installed a model of the USS Enterprise in the lobby of the Kent, Washington, headquarters of his aeronautical and space research firm, Blue Origin. This model has been positively identified as the actual eight-foot filming model from the first six Star Trek films, acquired for US$248,800 in Christie's 2006 40 Years of Star Trek: The Collection auction, and which had dropped out of sight for a period of time afterwards. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] He also once named a pet Labrador of his after the character of Kamala from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Perfect Mate". [11]

The Amazon voice recognition program called "Alexa" was partially inspired by Star Trek's interactive ship computers. [12] [13]

Bezos arrived with a number of bodyguards to the set of Beyond. Chris Pine confessed that he did not recognize Bezos but realized that he was someone of importance. Director Justin Lin recalled, "It was like a president was visiting, you know? He had a big entourage! But it didn’t matter because he was so into it. He had to wait around all day because it was one day we were shooting like three different scenes, and it was also a credit to Jeff because he just nailed it every time." [14]

In 2021, Saturday Night Live satirized Bezos' Blue Origin spaceflight as "Star Trek: Ego Quest". Bezos was aboard his company's first 20 July 2021 human space flight, NS-16, and had been embroiled in a private little "Space Race" of his own with fellow multi-billionaires and spacefaring entrepreneurs Richard Branson and Elon Musk to become the first one in space, a race he and Musk lost to Branson. Still, for his company's second human flight on 12 October 2021 he had invited William Shatner to become one of its four passengers for free, making him not only the oldest human to go into space, but also the very first primary contributor from Star Trek – or from any other science-fiction media franchise for that matter – , be it cast or production crew, to do so. [15] [16]

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