Even if Elon Musk is totally wrong, it is the vision that is important. The vision of creating a thriving Mars colony where millions of humans can live and work will drive incredible improvements in our technology, by inspiring thousands or even millions of people all over the world to study science and engineering.
Mr. Musk, thank you for being brave enough to give the world a vision of a brighter future.
The ability to think big is indeed rarer than it might first seem, and the ability to actually try to accomplish those big dreams is even rarer. We need people like Musk and Aubrey de Grey who dare to try to change the world for the better. The worse that can happen is that we make some progress but the ultimate goal is still out of reach for a while... Sounds better to me than not even trying.
From my perspective, its telling people about your big dreams so that they (and you) can hold yourself to them. But yes, people with massive ambitions such as Musk are needed to push things forward. If Musk achieves a tenth of his goal of colonizing Mars and just manages to land a person on Mars, he has still accomplished something no one else has.
That's unfair. You may be right, but they are similar in the way MikeCapone mentioned: they are both pushing the limits of science and technology in pursuit of a grand, incredible vision. Perhaps one of them is doing it completely wrong, but like MikeCapone said: better than not even trying.
Based solely on this information, I vote for Aubrey to take us to Mars. If he can't or won't, then I vote for UP Aerospace, the people who previously lost, and recovered, Scotty's ashes.
On a serious note, I find it disturbing that Musk doesn't show any real sense of responsibility. From the second article: "We certainly felt a huge responsibility for getting this [the ashes] back to the customers. She [Wende Doohan] trusted us to fly it into space, which we did successfully, and she trusted us to find it." No such effort or statement was made by SpaceX.
This lack of responsibility goes further, in a more general manner. I can't trust SpaceX to put millions of people on Mars when they can't even be bothered to do a small test on the moon. I understand that the environments are different, so the techniques and technologies used for a moon settlement may not easily transfer to Mars, but there is no real reason not to make an effort, even if it's just a year-long experiment to see if ten people could survive. Even if the moon isn't an important strategic goal, and I'm not sure that it isn't, at least it makes for a good testing ground. Bypassing the moon for Mars smacks more of unbridled grandiosity than it does of responsible reality.
Mr. Musk, thank you for being brave enough to give the world a vision of a brighter future.