That's the Musk manoeuvre. Promise very big, deliver a fraction.
The Vegas finger thing was also fun for that. We're going to make tunnels and you get there with a big car sized elevator. Scratch that, regular old escalator. We'll have high capacity speciale build buses. Scratch that, just a normal model X. But it will drive fully automated to the tunnels. Oh, no self driving, just human drivers. So it'll be very futuristic. Oops, just use RGB lighting then.
And he's not going to Mars for now. In NASA's moon mission the spaceship is basically an orbital fuel truck.