I'm sorry, but making a desktop app look like a phone app doesn't really "improve the user experience" by default. I've been using itunes for 6 or 7 years now, and i literally stood there for 5 minutes trying to figure out what the hell i was looking at when it first started up.
Your missing the point that owning part of a company for 10 seconds brings zero social value to the economy. Which I also tend to agree with. Slightly off-topic from the point of the article, which was that he achieved it without backing of a fairly large institution.
This is not even close to an accurate summary. He never stated that he had any employer backing, and he wasn't collecting market making fees. In fact he was paying brokerage fees which is the exact opposite.
I get tired of the "Don't hate the player, hate the game" mantra after a certain point though. We make the damn game. And if the players are assholes, the game is going to suck.
Of course it's a marketing play. Why else would a company willingly commit large sums of money to a completely unrelated business venture. And anyone who was watching the feed before and after the jump will know they did do plenty of back-story on Joe Kittinger and his original mission.
So maybe they should have called it. "3 problems that raytracing can't solve, and 4 other ones that just suck about modeling real life in 3d(on a 2d surface)".