A child is born on Mars, two hundred years after the first pressure hull was cast there. The hall where it comes into the world is older than its great-grandparents. The reactor that heats it dates back, at its core, to the founding years. The ice that supplies its water has been mined by the same plants for generations. Only the parts have been replaced.
I asked myself a simple question. Who owns this hall on the day the child is born?
A company built it. Someone else bought it. On Earth, that buyer would be a city, a housing company or an investor. On Mars, in the founding years, it will be a space agency or an operating company that carries and supplies the settlers. Measured against two hundred years, both are short-lived. Companies are taken over, broken up or sold on, perhaps several times. Agencies depend on budgets and governments. With every change, the owner of the walls people live in changes too.
On Earth, a change of ownership is a story in the business pages. On Mars, it decides who sets the conditions of survival. The question itself is not new, though. Some founders on Earth answered it for their companies more than a hundred years ago. Their answers are the best template we have for Mars.
Fifteen Years Against Two Hundred
How long owners last can be measured. In 1958, a company stayed in the S&P 500 index for 61 years on average. That figure is now around fifteen. Most companies do not disappear through bankruptcy. They are bought.
States last longer, but not in the same shape. Two hundred years ago, neither Germany nor Italy existed as a state. The United States consisted of twenty-four states. Whoever ties a city on Mars to a government ties it to an order that will no longer exist in that form two hundred years from now.
The longest-lived inhabited structure in space shows what happens between these time spans. Assembly of the International Space Station began in 1998. Five space agencies operate it. After a little more than thirty years, it is to fall into the Pacific in a controlled descent. Before that, it comes apart along its ownership lines. The private Axiom Space segment will be detached and fly on as a station of its own. Russia wants to separate three of its modules and turn them into the core of its own station. What was built together ends as the sum of its shares.
For a research station, that is an orderly farewell. For a city with families, it would be a collapse. A Mars city therefore needs an owner that outlasts every company. It must also outlast the government that once put it in place.
A Physicist in Jena
Ernst Abbe faced exactly this question in 1889. The physicist had turned Carl Zeiss's optical workshop into a company of world standing. After his partner's death, he set up a foundation on 19 May 1889 and gave it his partner's name. In 1891 it became the sole owner of the company. In 1919 Otto Schott also transferred his shares in the glassworks to it.
This foundation outlived the German Empire. It outlived two dictatorships. After the war, its plants in Jena were expropriated. In the West, new foundation companies arose in Oberkochen and Mainz. After reunification, the two parts came back together. The Carl Zeiss Foundation is the sole owner of Carl Zeiss AG and SCHOTT AG. Its ownership has held for more than 130 years, through wars, borders and changes of system.
Bosch added a second idea. Whoever owns the capital usually wants to decide as well. Robert Bosch separated the two in his estate, and it was put into effect in 1964. The charitable Robert Bosch Foundation holds around 94 percent of the capital. It has no influence on the group's strategy. Around 93 percent of the voting rights sit with Robert Bosch Industrietreuhand KG. This small circle decides, yet it has no share in the profits.
The money serves the common good. The decisions are made by people who earn nothing from the size of the payout. For a city on Mars, this separation is the core. Whoever controls the systems that lives depend on must not profit from running them on the cheap.
Where Permanence Becomes the Rule
In Denmark, this model is no exception. Around 1,300 companies there are owned by a foundation. They account for roughly 70 percent of the country's stock market value. Novo Nordisk is one of them, as are Carlsberg and Maersk.
The Copenhagen Business School has studied for years what this form of ownership does. Leadership changes less often. More money goes into research. Profits fluctuate less, and balance sheets carry less debt. In the end, these companies live longer.
The price is just as measurable. Foundation-owned companies grow more slowly, and their returns are lower. For a city on Mars, that is no disadvantage. A water treatment plant is not meant to grow. It is meant to run, year after year, without interruption.
Sweden shows another variant. In 1917, Knut and Alice Wallenberg set up their foundation, endowed with shares in the family's own bank and investment company. There are now sixteen family foundations. Through shares with multiple voting rights, the three largest hold just under a quarter of the capital of Investor AB. With that, they control half the votes. Every year, billions of kronor from the returns flow into Swedish research.
The Swedish example shows the strength of this form. It also shows its downside. A foundation can carry an entire economy for a century. With little capital, it can also concentrate a great deal of power permanently. On Mars, that power would reach not over companies, but over homes.
The Country With the Rockets
The United States will most likely be the first to settle Mars. Of all places, foundation ownership of companies is barely possible there.
The reason lies in 1969. Until then, many families had transferred their companies into foundations. They took the tax advantages, and little was left for charitable purposes. Congress responded by drawing a hard line. A private foundation, together with its founders and their families, may hold no more than 20 percent of the voting rights in a company. Anyone above that ultimately pays a penalty tax of up to twice the excess.
Newman's Own shows how strictly this line applies. Paul Newman left his food company entirely to his foundation. Every profit went to charitable causes. Even so, after his death the foundation would have had to sell 80 percent of the company. Only in 2018 did Congress create a narrow exception for foundations that own a company outright and pass on all profits.
American founders have therefore built their own routes. Since 2022, Patagonia has belonged to two entities. The Holdfast Collective holds 98 percent of the shares, but without voting rights. The Patagonia Purpose Trust holds the remaining 2 percent with all the votes. The large AI labs follow a similar logic. The nonprofit OpenAI Foundation owns around a quarter of OpenAI. It appoints the entire board. At Anthropic, a trust body now selects the majority of the board. Its members hold no shares in the company.
For Mars itself, only a single written draft of an order exists so far. It sits in Starlink's terms of service. Anyone using the service on Mars recognizes the planet as free. No government on Earth is to have authority there. Disputes are to be settled by principles of self-governance that will only emerge with settlement. Experts in international law consider the clause void. What remains remarkable is who wrote it. The first order for Mars comes from a company.
This is the American gap. The country with the rockets has made the instrument of permanence harder to use. The company with the rockets has already written down its own order.
When the Guardians Become the Risk
Foundation ownership protects against the market. It does not protect against its own guardians.
Through its holding company, the Novo Nordisk Foundation controls around three quarters of the votes in the pharmaceutical group of the same name. When the group's business stalled, the foundation first pushed out the chief executive. A few months later, more than half of the board stepped down. The chair of the foundation also took over as chair of the company. Observers called this dual role unprecedented in the company's history.
In India, the Tata Trusts hold around two thirds of Tata Sons, the parent of one of the country's largest conglomerates. The trustees have split into two camps. Their dispute reached the government in New Delhi. Most recently, the Trusts declared the reappointment of the group's chairman legally void. An owner that lasts forever can also block itself forever.
The second danger is quieter. Its name is secrecy. Most IKEA stores belong to the Dutch Stichting INGKA Foundation. This foundation owns itself, and no one has a claim to its assets. Each of its stores still pays three percent of its revenue to a separate brand group. That group is owned by a foundation in Liechtenstein that is close to the founding family. Rolex has belonged to the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation in Geneva since 1960. Swiss law requires it to disclose neither its figures nor its donations.
On Earth, you can avoid a company whose owner stays silent. On Mars, you live inside it. Permanence without accountability would not mean stability there. It would mean rule without an expiry date.
Ownership for Two Hundred Years
These cases add up to a blueprint. It begins before the first ground is broken.
Everything that life in the city depends on belongs to a foundation from the very start. That means the pressure hulls, the energy, the water, the life support. The companies that build these systems are paid for it. They may operate them under contract. They may not own them. That way the infrastructure stays in the same hands when an operator is taken over or an agency loses its budget. This is the lesson the space station draws for us.
The foundation's purpose is drawn as narrowly as Abbe's charter. This city shall remain habitable, nothing more. A sale is ruled out. Surpluses go into upkeep and renewal. As at Bosch, no one who decides earns anything from the returns.
That raises the question of who decides. Anthropic has written an idea into its charter that helps here. The weight of its trust body on the board grows there according to a fixed schedule. For Mars, I would apply this schedule to the residents. In the first decades, a body of experts from Earth runs the foundation. With every generation that grows up in the city, seats pass to elected residents. At some point they hold the majority. Step by step, the city becomes the guardian of its own foundations.
Against Rolex's silence stands the Danish model. The foundation's books are open to every resident, in full and every year. Fixed terms of office guard against a deadlock like Tata's. A clear separation guards against the dual role at Novo Nordisk. Whoever leads the foundation never runs the operations at the same time.
In the end, this form also settles a question that would otherwise turn into conflict. One day, a city on Mars will want to separate from Earth. If its infrastructure belongs to a company on Earth, the separation becomes a fight over property. If it belongs to a foundation whose guardians have long been residents, there is nothing left to hand over. The city already holds what it needs to live.
The building blocks for such a foundation already exist on Earth, only scattered. The Netherlands knows the foundation that owns itself. Denmark knows the supervision that oversees it. Germany is working on a legal form of its own for locked assets. America has shown how purpose and voting rights can be bundled even under strict rules. A foundation for Mars would have to bring these traditions together, across continents.
Before the First Hull Is Cast
In 1889, Ernst Abbe was not thinking of our time. He only made sure that no one after him could sell. That was enough to carry his works through a century full of ruptures.
For Mars, we have less room than he had. Abbe could bind an existing company after the fact. A Mars city cannot. As soon as the first pressure hull belongs to a company, the clock of takeovers starts ticking. The form of ownership must be settled before anything is built.
Which foundation on Earth would you trust to carry a city on Mars for two hundred years?
| The Planet Futures Organization, the first multiplanetary NGO.
Homepage: https://planet-futures.org