[imtringued]

Every manned Mars mission announced by Musk so far has assumed that astronauts will be staying on Mars for good and never return.

Cheeky Reddit discussions arguing how reaching Mars is easier than the moon care more about saving some delta V than saving the lives of the astronauts that would embark on a suicide mission just to appease SpaceX investors.

SpsceX has no plans to build a space station around Mars, meanwhile NASA wants to build a Mars gateway by rehearsing on the moon. SpaceX has not built any hardware or space suits that are necessary for long term survival on the martian surface. Those astronauts would arrive without any means for survival, stuck in their starship just as if they were stuck in a space station. Then there is the fact that at the current rate of progress, the mars schedule is faster than the moon/artemis schedule, implying that they don't care about the moon and are diverting resources away from it even though they have received money and a super tight deadline for it.