It's pretty clear there is barely enough commercial launch demand for falcon 9 (it already has ~100% of the non-foreign launch market, and there isn't a huge amount of price elasticity), so no reason at all to develop starship, apart from humans in space.
Mars is at best a long term goal for Starship, and far more likely to be just a nice story that Musk uses to motivate his engineers and investors.
It’s a terrible design for anything else, because it can barely get beyond LEO without in-orbit refuelling.
None of the competing rockets (e.g. New Glenn) resemble Starship in the slightest, because none of them are intended to fly to Mars.
Falcon Heavy put a car in a trans-Martian orbit, and Musk has been about Starship-like things going to Mars before SpaceX managed to launch the Falcon 1, let alone them getting a chance to bid for the return-to-Moon mission.
But the Artemis mission isn't really about doing things sensibly, it's about pork barrels. You can tell by looking at the wild disparity between the vehicles, where there's this complex process to put a handful of astronauts on a space station and transfer them to a landing vehicle… but the Lunar Gateway is smaller than Starship, and I think small enough you could fit all the parts of the Lunar Gateway inside the payload volume of one Starship.
If the USA wants to go to the moon for its own sake, they could do it cheapest by just paying SpaceX for a ride, not all the other contractors.
Settlement on Mars is out of one gravity well into another, so it's not clear if it's the best first location of a extraterrestrial human territory - Moon might be easier and more reasonable.
So the camp is split between Moon and Mars, and Musk has to be on Mars.
What sort of technologies become enabled when putting things in space gets cheaper?
