efaardvark

Yes.  Rural areas is his stated primary target audience since they're under-served by the AT&Ts and Comcasts and TimeWrners out there.  But any one who is disenchanted with the current monopolies is welcome as well.

And yes, pretty much everything he does is directly or indirectly related to setting up a permanent Mars colony.  Starlink was started because he needed something big to justify all the launches he's been doing, and putting up 12,000 satellites is a good way to guarantee a steady supply of paying customers for Falcon, Falcon Heavy, and Starship.  Of course the money has to come from somewhere, so "hey, how about we sell universal broadband while we're at it?".  While putting up Starlink he'll be getting experience to do the same thing at Mars, where there's virtually no global communications infrastructure.  Same reason he's taking people to the space station.  He'll probably also be the commercial carrier for NASA when they go to the Moon.  (He's already tried to get a NASA contract for a lunar landing, but Boeing and LockMart successfully lobbied against it on the grounds that they don't believe it can be done.  Whereupon Musk said, "It may literally be easier to just land Starship on the moon than try to convince NASA that we can.")  Again, more Mars practice.  Solar panels and batteries for houses and power grids.  Tunnel diggers.  Internal combustion engines don't work on Mars, but electric cars would.  It all fits together if you assume Mars as a background context.

The man may be crazy, but he's crazy like a fox.