that never dawned on me, you know it could be a way to start producing fuel for a return trip home too.

"never dawned on me" sounds like a great name for a SpaceX drone ship.

I think the autonomous drones are a key component to Musk's colony plans.

So far NASA has been doing plenty on Mars, and Musk has done zero. He does love to talk and blow things up.

This is not a rivalry, this is collaboration. NASA has different goals and SpaceX has different goals, but where they can, they're working together. Without NASA's contracts SpaceX wouldn't be where it's right now.

NASA can't remember the difference between feet and meters, and they are notorious for delay delay delay. They are also famous for blowing up some shit too. Sadly, they have even lost humans on multiple occassions. They are not perfect.

Musk has a rocket that can be reused multiple times, and can deliver to the ISS. NASA can't do any of that.

NASA has been around for 70 years, yet still no people on Mars. Just cute little robots that they hired others to build for them. Short Musk all you want, but he's the only one that I think will actually attempt doing things on mars than taking pictures and soil samples.

This is irrelevant, the ultimate objective on mars is finding nitrogen in the soil and releasing it into the atmosphere. If this is possible then it's the first thing you should do, perhaps hundreds of years before the first human steps on mars, if this is impossible, then going to mars was a bad idea in the first place.