It was, but once Starship becomes operational, the financial game changes by many orders of magnitude - to a point where a single billionaire with no fucks to give can actually book themselves a ride to Mars.
One may hate on Musk for a number of very good reasons, but it cannot be denied him, Shotwell and the rest of the SpaceX team have thoroughly kicked the established space industry mooches into their asses.
There's a huge chasm between "disrupting an already inefficient space industry" and "living on Mars".
We barely have the capability of living long term on Antarctica, and it has plentiful water, oxygen, gravity, a magnetic field, and doesn't have lethal radiation. Until I see a 100K population colony on Antarctica, I'll be unconvinced that we even have a prayer of building a 1K population colony on Mars.
We could easily build a 100k colony in Antarctica or out in the ocean right now (or in the Australian Outback or Canadian north or any other inhospitable boring hellscape)
I'll admit that I'm not sure what the point of a mars colony is either, except for science and to act as a forward space outpost.. maybe it would be useful for industrial purposes? I guess you wouldn't have to worry about utterly destroying the environment.
If it were mostly self sufficient it could act as a seed to repair earth society in the event of a catastrophic asteroid strike or nuclear war, I guess
Meh. No one wants to live on the poles, not even for bragging rights, other than a few scientists. Mars however? There's a shitload of people who'd volunteer to go there simply for their entry in the history books.
