It's certainly a gamble that there will be a million people willing to spend $200k to do this, which… well, I think it's not entirely impossible, as the idea was something I liked until Musk's own personality put me off the idea of being stuck on a planet with only his sycophants for company.
Which is a bit of a shame, but still, I'd give it 50-50 odds of being a product-market fit just for that.
Elon is undoubtedly great at getting folks to commit money and talent to his companies, and talking about plausible-ish things like becoming a multiplanetary species is one way he accomplishes that.
"Dying on Mars, just not on impact" is Musk's final bucket list item. Almost everything else he does is to enable that vision, either directly by creating the tech, or indirectly because he knows this is expensive.
He may well fail, nobody's ever done this and we don't know how many surprises there will be.
But the ship working well enough for $200k tickets is plausible.
(The idea that banks will give people loans for that, not so much: without multi-planetary trade, nothing that happens on Mars can repay a debt on Earth, and I don't see Mars as having any special economic benefits to make such trade worthwhile).
This is just marketing hype.
That money is a thing he needs for the very expensive bucket list item.
They won't make a satellite but they will demand things which middlemen can solve with a satellite.
> You have to find the customers, it is not like you make a product and everyone changes their desires to conform.
Once smartphones were invented, people found within themselves the desire for a smartphone.
Although there's a lot of debate about this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say's_law
So-called "induced demand" is just a dumbing down of the more fundamental notion of supply and demand, for people who aren't comfortable thinking about math, calculus, dynamic equilibria, etc. If you read the wikipedia article on it, you'll see they constantly describe it in terms of supply and demand. The term was originally "defined" in 1999 in a paper that was not written by economists. It's not an economics term.
in terms of transportation planning, a better way to think about it is, "misery distributes itself throughout the system".
A large enough change in scale manifests as a change in kind.
As a topical example, SpaceX is trying to reduce launch costs by 20x with Starship, which just had its 4th test flight this morning. Some don't see the point: there's not nearly enough demand to launch thousands of tons into orbit per year. But 20x is a lot cheaper, so they're banking on induced demand expanding the kinds of projects that send things to space.