I think there's a bigger danger to becoming a profit-centered publicly traded company than just them not innovating. The character of future society on Mars wi

I think there's a bigger danger to becoming a profit-centered publicly traded company than just them not innovating. The character of future society on Mars will in large part depend on the policies of the large corporations that provide the technology and infrastructure to make it possible, and I would rather that Mars society looks like a diverse, free, liberal democracy with reasonable opportunities for homesteading and an efficient economy with multiple competing vendors for various resources and not like a forced labor camp where you work your 80 hours a week in exchange for the CO2 filters you need to survive, or like a tourist destination where one company owns the whole Mars Experience. In the short term it's probably inevitable that one company will have a transportation-to-Mars monopoly, but if that company has some good founding principles and a vision that doesn't involve milking every last dime out of their monopoly status, then I can at least feel a little better that Mars has a chance of not becoming a dystopia.