Yeah, so the lore goes, Musk just wanted to send humans to Mars, and had no intention, originally, to build his own rockets. The first tactic was to retool an ICBM for spacier spaceflight, but the Russians laughed them out of the country.
In fact, setting up as much automation as possible, pre-people, would be a good way to establish the human safety of Mars flights.
As well as supercharging the productivity and quality of life of the first Marsers when they finally do arrive.
From the first paragraph or two of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX
> In August 2001, Musk shared a plenary talk with Mike Griffin at the fourth Mars Society convention where he announced his plans to send his greenhouse to Mars.[6] In October 2001, Musk travelled to Moscow with Jim Cantrell and Adeo Ressi to buy refurbished Dnepr ICBMs that could send the envisioned payloads into space.[7]