Why Captain Kirk's Greatest Role is as a Corporate Shill

William Shatner has been many things over his career. Beatnik. Groovy spaceship captain best known for banging female aliens on every planet in the universe. Slowly fatter spaceship Captain. Comically angst-ridden (and yet angstless) lawyer. And of course wacky face of Priceline.com. In a weird turn of events, that last job as corporate shill may have been his greatest role ever.

You see, Priceline paid him in large chunks of stock. And that stock has blown up since the dot com bust. Priceline's doing so well they're buying Kayak for $1.8 billion. Shatner, due to the amount of stock he owns, is therefore going to be a partial owner of Kayak. But the kicker - Shatner's stock has made him about $600 million worth of profit according to sources for Nikki Finke.

That's right. The king of STAR TREK and comic partner on BOSTON LEGAL has made $600 million doing zany commercials for a travel website in which he plays a character called the Priceline Negotiator. 



So there's a lot going on here. We have Kayak, which is just an aggregator of other travel websites, selling for almost $2B (the buying price is $40 a share, about a 29% premium over their closing price which is also how much the company's revenues rose from same time last year). Showing yet again that middleman industries are the real heroes on the Internet - or at least in modern America.

We have one of the few Internet companies that was actually around before the last Dot Com bubble (remember how you'd name a price and then you were locked in, no matter what kind of flight it was or how it got you there?) doing so well they can throw such large chunks around for a simple aggregator. A member of the old guard, at its low-point Priceline stock (PCLN) was worth less than a dollar a share. Now it's going for @ $627 and its market cap is about $31 billion with gains of about 800% over the last half decade. An amazing story of not only a business defeating adversity

Then there's William Shatner who may be remembered by our fathers as the guy who made sci-fi cool but for us he's that fat guy on Priceline commercials and that show with that dude who was on 2 seasons of THE OFFICE and that chick who had that show, what was her name, Shitty Brown? Murphy Brown, right. A very recognizable actor whose smartest and most lucrative career move was becoming the protagonist of a series of weird, cheesy, and occasionally funny ads. Making half a billion dollars as the star of a series of commercials. Boldly going where no actor has gone before.

It's a strange world, people. God Bless America.

- Ryan