If you’re doing a comparison with anywhere on Earth, the obvious one would be Antarctica. There absolutely are permanent settlements there even though it’s barely livable, but really only for relatively short term visitors to do scientific research and/or enjoy the experience of being one of the few people to travel there. It absolutely isn’t a functioning economy that runs at a profit. (Some places inside the Arctic Circle, maybe, but that wouldn’t be the case if shipping the exploitable resources back to somewhere that felt more like home cost spaceflight prices per kg). The profitable segment of space is the orbital plane around earth, ideally without the complications of people in the equation, and that’s what SpaceX has actually spent the last decade focused on.
Antartica is also an interesting comparison point for the social and legal systems since it’s also small numbers of people from different missions living on extraterritorial land. I mean, they’re not really particularly well sorted out, it just turns out they involve far too few people and far too little competition to be particularly problematic.
The presence of a company worth a few tens of billions whose founder talks about colonizing Mars (amongst many other bold claims) and has concrete plans in the subset of Mars colonization problems that involve actually getting there feels very compatible with the original suggestion that the plausible near term consequence is a small number of astronauts hanging out in a dome and some cracking TV footage, not an epoch-defining social transformation
Looked from another angle, fifty years ago the colonization of space wasn’t driven by half of one billionaire’s fortune,[1] it was driven by a significant fraction of the GDP of both the world’s superpowers locked in a race, and the last 20 years’ transition was from nothing in space to lunar landings, space stations, deep space probes, not from expensive launches and big satellites to cheaper launches and a lot more small satellites. So you had better arguments for imminent space cities half a century ago.
the part he isn’t spending on his social media habit, anyway...