Why is Elon Musk building rockets?

There are 2 possible reasons for this:

1 Elon realised that we have to become a multi-planetary species to have hope for the future.

2 Elon realised that building and launching low orbit satellites would become incredibly profitable and the best way to wrongfoot competitors was to claim he was interested in Mars. It’s also a much better way to motivate staff to work hard if they think they are part of the Mars mission rather that the “Make Elon even wealthier” mission.

I hope I’m wrong on this one but if you look at Elon’s statements about first principles, it’s unlikely that he would seriously be planning to send milions of people (paying $200k each!) to an inhospitable planet with no atmosphere, water, oxygen or plants.

You can’t compare it with the trip to the New World- this was a place with bison, fish, oxygen. These astonauts would be on a suicide mission.

Meanwhile, on Planet Earth, Musk and SpaceX has a massive first mover advantage on every other country/company trying to compete because you can’t launch a satellite without a very large rocket.

“SpaceX has an important advantage. Satellites in low orbit don’t last very long, so the company replaces them on a regular basis. That entails a large number of rocket launches (one is pictured here). SpaceX has the world’s best system for that, the partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket. Now it is working on a much larger, fully reusable spacecraft called Starship which could launch hundreds of satellites at a time. Some Chinese companies appear to be trying to build knock-offs.

All of the activity worries China. The Liberation Army Daily complains that there is only room for 50,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit and that Starlink may eventually take up more than 80% of that space. But the calculation is not that straightforward, says Juliana Suess of the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank in Britain. Imagine low orbit as a highway, she says. What needs to be calculated is how many moving cars that highway can safely accommodate. Much will depend on the size of satellites and their trajectories.”

https://www.economist.com/china/2023/05/18/why-china-fears-starlink

Genius?