Musk is the type of guy who thinks the key roadblock in any problem is that he isn’t in charge. It’s harder to be in charge of Earth than it is to be in charge of Mars.

Coca-Cola’s mission statement is ‘to refresh the world’.

That sounds a lot nicer than their actual mission ‘to make as much money as possible selling sugar water’.

Colonizing Mars is not his intention, it’s just a cool sounding thing that he pretends he wants to do for social clout. He’s interested making money and being popular, that’s the extent of it all.

To be fair, you dont actually have to terraform a planet to colonize it, theres nothing physics defying with having a civilization of people living in airtight buildings with controlled climate inside indefinitely. It still isnt a solution to climate change for any number of obvious reasons, but I dont know that anyone that seriously wants to see a mars colony start in their lifetime actually intends to terraform the place first. Terraforming gets thrown around casually in science fiction, but to actually reshape the entire surface and climate of a planet that way, even if we had the requisite technology and infrastructure right now, would be a process that would probably take millennia at best and be incredibly destructive to any infrastructure existing on the surface during that time. If you want to build a mars colony now, rather than at some point where we’re ancient history after human civilization has finished what would be to them the largest and longest construction project ever, then you pretty much have to accept Mars’s climate conditions for what they are and build around them rather than try to change them.

If they were serious about mars then they should be building very large scale very long term habitats deep in the ocean. It’s a lot closer than Mars so if something goes wrong they can improve the design faster. A trip to mars is expected to take nearly 2 years!