RemindMe! 20 years:
I'll bet you 100 MoonBaseCoins that China beats Musk to a manned moon landing.
The Artemis mission isn't to be the first to get to the moon. The mission is to make a permanent lunar settlement.
China might land some small lander before StarShip arrives - but with reuse and huge capacity StarShip is an excellent cargo vehicle.
I seriously doubt it. While China's made a lot of progress, there's no possible way the US government isn't suddenly going to discover a priority if there's a risk China gets another man on the moon first this century.
Elon is slightly crazy as most billionaires are, he's just crazy in a very specific direction: some people buy mega yachts, he wants a SpaceX rocket to be landing humans on Mars.
Now in reality...SpaceX can't privately fund a manned mission anywhere. That's got to be a NASA/international thing - if only because the core competencies are so incredibly broad-ranging (SpaceX do rockets - and rockets are already a "here's 50 fields you can contribute a Ph.D to, we need all of them to make this work"). But if your goal is to go to Mars, then you talk about, and build towards, going to Mars and wait for NASA to say "hey we'd like to get the moonbase going".
Which is pretty much what has happened: I have no doubt that in the next 20 years we're going to see a manned mission to the Moon, and I'm very sure that it's going to be a Starship that takes it there.