Why would I need to choose just one? He’s the only person with a serious presence on the planet. He builds a landing pad that works exclusively with his rockets, and ANYTHING that happens on the planet will be going through him. Hell, he can probably convince China or the US to pay to build the habitats if he wants to.
But nothing will be happening on the planet, except a few rovers, because there is nothing of value whatsoever on Mars that is not literally a thousand times cheaper to find/do on Earth.
Not this type of tourism. It might make a small amount of money, but there is no huge market for extremely expensive (think a hundred thousand dollars per trip per person) but 0-comfort exploration of barren wastelands that you can't even see for more than maybe an hour or risk being radiation poisoned. Will there be a trickle of extremely wealthy dare-devils? Sure. But this is neither a Greek island nor Monaco.
I agree it's not as straightforward and accept your version of the future as very real possibility as well, but I'm focusing more on the aspect of showing off something that differentiates you. Already on instagram you have plenty of things with lots of views and social capital that generate a great picture of a specific view, but the actual experience of getting there or everything around it are miserable. People pay a lot of money to have something that can make them feel special and going to Mars would have that property maxed out.
Even his cheapest estimates are still in the $100,000 USD range; I don't think you can support enough tourists to colonise Mars when the ticket alone costs that much.
I can see plenty of people going to Mars — religious groups, cults, anyone who wants to explore the final frontier, the most extreme preppers (which Musk arguably is given his "multi-planetary" arguments), and anyone who would like to build their own mountain-sized space castle.
What I can't figure out what any of those people might sell to Earth such that people on Earth are willing to trade for it, except for information which people on Earth can also produce without paying so much for a ticket.
