While yes, I agree Mars appears to have been Musk's long term goals:

> the gigantic Starship Factory and multiple launch pads under construction in Texas, Florida and Louisiana (plus potentially foreign countries) only make sense with Mars.

There's a few other things that also make sense as use-cases for that infrastructure. Orbital manufacturing is already starting to get interesting. I don't want to bet either way on space-based data centres, the research I've seen from Google says that makes sense at $200/kg which Starship can only reach if SpaceX solves re-use and that's clearly difficult but I don't want to say impossible.

Or the attempt to Kessler Syndrome and Neuromancer it up as fast as possible by trying to send up 1m satellites. https://spacenews.com/spacex-files-plans-for-million-satelli...

I don't think these will be in Earth orbit. I think they will be in Sol's orbit.

And how exactly is SpaceX going to make any meaningful ROI on getting Mars orbit capability? It's not like people and govt's are raring to get there.

Scientific organizations like NASA would jump on a Mars Starship in a heartbeat, but how many missions will they want?

SpaceX is a corporation first and foremost, not a research org.

They're getting ROI on other ventures and uses those returns to finance their expansion towards Mars (and other planetary) orbit capacity. It may be rare to see a company looking further than the next quarterly report but it is nothing new for either SpaceX or some of Musk's other ventures.