Favorite Captain/war criminal was Sisko. DS9 remains the only Star Trek that seems grounded and representing the consequences of the sort of democratic crusading that defined the series and American politics of the latter 20th century.

That's an interesting tale of outgrowing heroes.

TBH, Capt. Janeway (Mulgrew) is still my favourite leader in Voyager perhaps more than Picard (Stewart)

Ironically - didn't Shatner outgrow his love for the mission to boldly go?

When he returned with Jeff Bezos something of the coldness of space returned with him, he said something cryptic like "All I see out there is death..."

Edit: Bezos, of course not Musk

He went up with Bezos, and I recall that his speech was rudely interrupted by Bezos excitedly shaking a champagne bottle.

Shatner has often been critical of the Trek ethos. I saw him give a talk in the 1990s where he said "it seems to me that technology is an evil demon come to destroy us all"

"Evil / malfunctioning AI that must be stopped" was a persistent theme in TOS when he was Kirk, significantly less common in later series.

Not to be pedantic, but it was Bezos not Musk…

Star Trek is fiction, not necessarily the ideal place to be finding role models.

Fiction is an excellent place to find role models. Fiction characters are literally models of humans. That’s what writers do.

I love Captain Kirk’s leadership style. The author of this post is interpreting Kirk out of context. Within his context, Kirk was fiercely loyal and protective of his crew. He was also a military commander, not a CEO. He was dealing with life and death.

Kirk followed a moral code. Not like modern Christian evangelicals who abandon their code in a lust for domination. Kirk was lawful. His idea of lawfulness did not always mean he followed other people’s rules.

He was modeled on a cultural matrix from 1960 that was imagining a multicultural world of the future. Modern life has drifted from that context. Which is okay. But it’s a fit for me.