It would seem so, yes.
> What about Boeing and Lockheed Martin (ULA)?
Doubtful. Their motivation is to earn profit. Elon's motivation is his "pioneerism" (the doctrine behind the act of pioneering).
> At least with a government landing on Mars, you can expect science to be conducted.
It's been 44 years since humans physically conducted science on another body. Robots are great for "doing science" that's planned out in advance, humans are great for "doing science" ad-hoc.
> What does a for-profit company do there, when there's not much to make a profit from?
I just don't see SpaceX as a for-profit company when its leader unabashedly says that profiteering would ruin his vision for SpaceX. The fact that people keep throwing money at them just underscores the human (and, yes, corporate) drive to stand behind him.
> What's the end-game here? We land and say "we did it!"... then what?
That's the most wonderful thing of all. We don't know what would happen next. To quote Richard Feynman (emphasis added): "Some people say, 'How can you live without knowing?' I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know."
(Of course in the process of landing a million people on Mars, he'll need to balance the books to make it financially sustainable. I do have some questions about how he'll do that, but can envision a handful of ways to make it work. The actual value, however, is almost entirely off-book.)
Financially:
(1) It's a wonderful tech demo and brand builder to attract customers who want to buy a ride to LEO on a very reliable rocket.
(2) To get to mars without a national-sized budget, they need to make the entire project stack cheaper and more reliable than ever before, which helps them sell rides to LEO cheaper than the competition.
(3) What's the end-game here? We land and say "we did it!"... then what?
Musk says he is dead serious about a permanent colony on Mars as insurance against human extinction on Earth. There's no end game - it's the beginning of life spreading from the Earth.
If SpaceX can show they are have a very capable platform for heavy lifting before anyone else they can retain that position for a long time. Moon bases, Hubble replacements, long term space stations all need heavy launch capabilities. SpaceX wants to sell them their premier service.
Although, wouldn't building a moon base first make more sense? Walk before you can run, sort of thing? Or even Venus, since it's closer.
NASA is a government scientific research entity, and has no obligation to turn a profit. SpaceX and ULA do.
Secondly, it's worth noting that "billions" isn't as big of a number as you'd think in the context of modern capital markets. PwC published a paper recently that estimated there'd be $100 trillion in so-called assets under management (AuM) by 2020. (http://www.pwc.com/us/en/press-releases/2014/pwc-global-asse...) The market capitalization of Amazon _today_ is $400 billion.
Theoretically, SpaceX could easily raise all the money it needs and more. I don't know how practical that would be, or even if that's their plan at all. But the salient point here is that there's a _ridiculous_ amount of global capital up for grabs. This ain't the 1950s or 1980s. The rise of the third-world and the pace of global trade has created an almost unfathomable amount of wealth. Even if the markets crash tomorrow and it's cut in half, it's still unfathomable from the perspective of 20 or 30 years ago.
I remember reading an Economist article in the late 1990s (maybe early oughts) that showed using historical data that wealth tended to grow exponentially. (I haven't been able to track it down.) The point of the article was that wealth inequality will naturally increase dramatically because for any time span those with more wealth will accumulate even more wealth, proportionally, then someone poorer. The gap will naturally widen without forced redistribution.
Ignore issues about wealth inequality for a moment and think about what that phenomenon means for the amount of global capital available for investment. All that capital needs to be _invested_ somewhere. Even if appetite for risk never changes, it means the amount of capital available for the most risky ventures will grow dramatically. But perhaps as capital growth outpaces investment opportunities, appetite for risk will increase.
My point being, the practicality of a privately-funded Mars venture is likely to become more practical by the year. So even if it's starry-eyed today, it might not be in 5 or 10 years.
It's going to cost billions to reach Mars, and more billions to develop things to a "good enough" point to actually make the round trip feasible - and so far, at least to my knowledge, we've found nothing of enough value to make trips there economically viable for a for-profit corporation.
Sure, they'll get government contracts, but that doesn't pay for the first trip there (which appears will be entirely on their own/investors dime).
There aren't massive gold or platinum deposits we've found - and even if there were, surely it would be difficult to extract and recover due to mass.
I firmly believe Musk is totally willing to bankrupt his company (and himself) to achieve his goal of landing on Mars, but are his investors? What about Boeing and Lockheed Martin (ULA)?
At least with a government landing on Mars, you can expect science to be conducted. What does a for-profit company do there, when there's not much to make a profit from?
What's the end-game here? We land and say "we did it!"... then what?