“You wanna know what my vision is? Dollar signs, money! I didn’t build this ship to usher in a new era for humanity.”

You would be forgiven for thinking those words were spoken by Jeff Bezos, the megabillionaire who owns Amazon and the aerospace company Blue Origin. But as most Trekkies could tell you, those words were spoken by Zefram Cochrane, as played by James Cromwell in the movie Star Trek: First Contact.

Of course among those Trekkers is also Bezos. In fact, Bezos got to tell William Shatner, Captain Kirk himself, how much Star Trek meant to him in the latter’s new book, William Shatner … and You, excerpted in Variety. After explaining the ways in which he loved Star Trek as a child, Bezos said that one of his goals with Blue Origin “is to help humanity on its journey to the Star Trek future.” Yet if Bezos is going to realize that dream, he needs to pay as much attention to Star Trek‘s material reality as he does to its depiction of the stars.

To be sure, the primary plot in Star Trek: First Contact deals with the Borg plan to go back in time and conquer Earth before the advent of deep space flight and the founding of the Federation. However, the film is also about Zefram Cochrane himself. First introduced in the Original Series episode “Metamorphosis,” where he was played by Glenn Corbett, Cochrane is a hero of Starfleet and the Federation, the man whose selfless construction of Earth’s first warp-capable ship set humanity on a path into the franchise’s utopian future. However, when the Enterprise crew goes back in time to 2030 and meet Cochrane (now played by James Cromwell) on the eve of his historic flight, they find not just a slovenly drunk who considers himself a failure with Cochrane’s ID card; they also discover a craven capitalist, who hopes that his invention will make him rich beyond his wildest dreams.

Whatever Cromwell thought when he delivered those lines in First Contact, released in 1996, he probably wouldn’t have dreamed that any one person could one day be worth $265 billion, like Bezos is in 2026. Inequality has grown widely over the past 30 years, to the point that Bezos, Elon Musk, and Larry Page hold the lion’s share of the world’s wealth, while the masses go without. And yet, Bezos looks to Star Trek of all things as a model for the future.

Save for an poorly-chosen nod to Elon Musk in Discovery (and even then, it came from the mouth of someone from the evil Mirror Universe), Star Trek has always understood inequality and the pursuit of wealth as contrary to the good of society. Captain Picard puts it plainly in the season one Next Generation episode, “The Neutral Zone,” when a rich man who cryogenically froze himself awakens aboard the Enterprise and starts making demands based on his money. A confused Picard tries to explain that such things no longer matter. “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions,” he states, before putting it bluntly, “We’ve grown out of our infancy.”

Conversely, the Deep Space Nine two-parter “Past Tense” shows how massive inequality leaves humanity hamstrung, unable to advance. Only when the poor rise up in the Bell Riots, ultimately caused by Captain Sisko, does humanity begin moving toward its better future.

Yet the best example of Star Trek‘s ethos may be Cochrane himself, as portrayed in First Contact. Materialistic as he is, Cochrane is not heartless or craven. Rather he simply cannot imagine anything beyond the capitalist system put in place. In his mind, one succeeds by earning lots of money, therefore he puts his genius to work, creating a product that he can exchange for cash.

However, the arrival of Riker and the Enterprise crew shows Cochrane something different. As Picard tells Cochrane’s partner Lily (Alfre Woodard), “The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.” When Lily asks if that means people don’t get paid for their labor, Picard reveals that such a system no longer even exists. “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity,” he declares.

It’s this example that eventually expands Cochrane’s mind and shows him a different way. For us viewers, Star Trek does that expansion, reminding us that the system we currently have in place does not need to be, that other forms of life are possible. Of course that requires someone paying attention to the actual message of the show and looking beyond the limitations of their imagination, something Bezos might seem incapable of doing. But if even Zefram Cochrane can change, perhaps there’s hope for Bezos yet. If Star Trek has taught us anything, it’s that there’s always hope in the future.

The post Star Trek-Loving Billionaires Just Don’t Seem to Get Gene Roddenberry appeared first on Den of Geek.