David Wade

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The math on William Shatner’s existence is hard to process. He was born closer to the Civil War than to today. Montreal, 1931. His father manufactured clothes. His first acting role came in 1951, the same year color TV was introduced to the American public. Star Trek premiered in 1966. It lasted 3 seasons and got cancelled. The first rerun aired before humans had walked on the Moon. Those reruns are still generating licensing revenue 57 years later. He’s been famous for 60 consecutive years. He survived being typecast so severely in the 1970s that he did convention appearances for grocery money. He survived his third wife’s death. He survived Hollywood writing him off as a joke. Then he weaponized the joke. Priceline commercials. The roast. Spoken-word albums where he recites Elton John lyrics as dramatic monologue. Every project that should have ended his career somehow added to it. At 73, back-to-back Emmys for Boston Legal. At 90, oldest person to fly to space. At 94, a Super Bowl ad. At 95, 4.3 million people watching him smoke a cigar on X. His career has now outlasted the Soviet Union, the Space Shuttle program, Blockbuster Video, MySpace, and the first three generations of AI models. He’s been working since Truman and he’s posting through the Claude era. The compounding is the point. 75 years of showing up created a distribution moat that no amount of talent alone could replicate.