TV URBAN LEGEND: William Shatner made $600 million out of being Priceline's original TV spokesperson.
The world of Silicon Valley is filled with booms and busts and strange instances where people who chose to get paid in stock (or have stock figure into their overall payments) ended up walking away with hundreds of millions later on. One of the most famous examples is the muralist, David Choe, who was hired by then-Facebook President, Sean Parker, to do murals on the original offices of Facebook. Choe later recalled to Howard Stern, “My prices had been going higher and higher, and I was like, 'Yeah, I mean, if you want me to paint the entire building, it’s going to be 60, you know, 60 grand.'" Parker agreed, but offered him the payment in equivalent Facebook stock. Choe told Stern, “It was a risky decision. Facebook was a joke." His shares could have ended up worthless, but Parker convinced him to take the stock. When Facebook went public, Choe's stock was suddenly worth $200 million. He explained to Stern, “It’s gonna sound horrible for me to say money is meaningless. I did everything I wanted to when I had nothing. Everyone’s like, ‘Well, what are you gonna do now?’ I’m like, ‘I’m still gonna do whatever I want except more people are just gonna bother me now. Don’t feel sorry for me. This is like a godlike amount of money – where I could actually change the world and do things to help humanity and do good things. As an artist, I often wonder what my purpose is or why I do what I do. So those things will hopefully come into more clarity, or maybe not. I don’t know.”
When there are so many confirmed stories like the Choe one, it makes it easy, then, to believe wild headlines about similar situations, which is how it came to be that people have mostly believed that William Shanter made $600 million out of being the spokesperson for Priceline.
WHEN DID WILLIAM SHATNER GO TO WORK FOR PRICELINE?
Priceline launched in 1997 using a "Name Your Own Price" system where consumers would pick a price that they were willing to pay for a trip (flight, hotel, rental car, etc.) and then Priceline's search system would try to find a trip that would match those parameters. However, the consumer would be locked into a price without the ability to cancel if the consumer didn't like the arrangements later on. You know, sort of "You get what you pay for," with Priceline then making a profit on the difference between the actual cost of the itinerary and the cost that the consumer said that it would be willing to pay.
The company hired William Shatner as its spokesperson with a series of clever commercials based on 1968 album, The Transformed Man, which featured Shatner doing monologues and spoken word songs.
This was during the original Dot Com boom, when online companies were blowing up in popularity. As a result, a legend has spread that Shatner made a great deal of cash out of the boom. From a Toronto Sun article in 2010:
If anyone has noticed the soaring share price of Priceline.com, it’s an easy bet that Canadian actor William Shatner had something to do with it.
Unofficial word on Wall Street is that Shatner, who was initially paid in Priceline shares when he became pitchman for the Internet travel website startup in 1997, is now worth a cool $600 million. No wonder he looked so happy singing a duet of Total Eclipse of the Heart on Lopez Tonight the other week. Priceline’s shares, which at one point plummeted to $1.80 during the dot-com crisis in 2000, are now trading close to $300 apiece. And although the company won’t disclose how many shares (or salary) Shatner receives, it’s presumed to be plenty. After all, it’s Shatner’s personality driven ads for the website that has made it so popular.
That, naturally, has proved to become a very popular story in the years since. $600 million?!!? Can that possibly be true?
Well....
DID WILLIAM SHATNER REALLY MAKE $600 MILLION FOR THE COMPANY?
In 2013, Jeffrey Boyd, chairman and CEO of Priceline, went on CNBC to discuss the company and the topic of Shatner's rumored $600 million compensation came up in the conversation. He said that Shatner sold most of his shares at a relatively low price, but stressed that Shatner was doing fine financially, and no one should feel bad for him.
In 2020, the New York Times looked into the subject and revealed that:
Shatner was originally awarded 125,000 shares of Priceline for work in the late 1990s. At that time, he sold half of his shares at a max price of $104.25, with the shares then tanking to $5.56. The 65,000 shares were later subject to a 1:6 reverse stock split in 2003, meaning he held more than 10,830 shares as of the NYT article. If Shatner held all those shares through to today, they would be worth $13,050,150 – a nice sum, but substantially lower than the $600 million rumors.
If he sold the 60,000 shares for $104 a share, that would have been around six million dollars. So all told, it would be about $20 million. So yes, Shatner made millions working for Priceline, which is still very cool for him, just not the hundreds of millions of dollars that he was rumored to have made out of the situation. Of course, it's a lot more interesting of a story when it's $600 million for making fun of your own 30-year-old album, ya know?
The legend is...
STATUS: False
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