The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

by Christian Davenport

The mysterious buyer was amassing an impressive collection of ranches, cloaking his identity by buying the land under corporate entities with curious names: Jolliet Holdings and Cabot Enterprises, the James Cook and William Clark Limited Partnerships, and Coronado Ventures. All were named for explorers who had opened up frontiers, from the American West, to New Zealand and the Great Barrier Reef, to Mexico and Canada. All linked to a little-known corporation, doing business out of Seattle Post Office Box 94314, with an out-of-this-world-sounding name: Zefram LLC. Right there was a clue to the buyer’s identity and his intentions. Zefram Cochrane was a character in Star Trek who created the first spaceship capable of traveling at warp speeds, or faster than the speed of light. He was an explorer of another sort, a fictional one from the future, who said the warp speed engine “will let us go boldly where no man has gone before.”