That's cool. I don't have any particular attachment to any of these companies so personally I figure any advancements in this area are good for us as a whole.
Yeah, pretty much this.
Hearing Bezos outline his vision on the Lex Fridman podcast a year ago, he's hoping SpaceX and Blue Origin can build a foundation for local space industry. He's thinking they will build the infrastructure and future companies will develop business models that rely on that. He compared it to the internet industry building on the back of the existing telephone infrastructure in the 1990s.
If they can get rockets launching regularly into orbit, then they can reach out to the Moon. If they can establish some basic infrastructure on the Moon, then they can start thinking about Mars. If they can eventually get a foothold on Mars, then they can start venturing out to the asteroid belt and figuring out how to mine resources from it. And once we start tapping the asteroid belt, then we can lunch more and more missions to the outer planets and start building permanent space stations close to Earth.
The key is some organization (public or private) has to build out the early infrastructure. It's the egg in the chicken-and-egg problem. Seeing NASA's budget consistently get cut, it's unlikely the public is going to pay for it, so it's up to private companies to make this happen.