@ Cyber: The private part is pretty cool, yes. I have my doubts, however, at the Moon being useful for Mars in the near-term. Maybe over hundreds of years, because by then we could establish mining, smelting, fabricating and manufacturing operations around the Moon for creation of permanent spacecraft.
There is long-term useful, but there is also short-term useful. Equipment and procedures need to be tested and refined along the way. We didn't get men on to the moon by jumping immediately into an Apollo Command / Lunar / Service Module design and heading out to the moon. All sorts of things needed to be tried, learned from, and tweaked or redesigned. Spacewalking, for example, turned out to be much harder than anticipated. Even during the ISS era, we have come close to killing an astronaut. Even the Apollo 10 mission discovered something that was important to Apollo 11's success.
New endeavors will benefits from previous lessons learned, but there will be new things to be tested and refined. It would appear that may be especially true for privately funded endeavors such as what SpaceX aims to do.
Space is about pushing limits, same as explorers of old going across the seas to discover the unknown. America wasn't useful when it was first discovered--it was dangerous. But it was inspirational enough to inspire a few brave Europeans hundreds of years later to flee their homelands for something better. Space needs inspiration. It needs to capture young minds. It needs to be cooler than whatever the idiotic topic du jour is such as stupid stars in hollywood or silly folks who are worth hundreds of millions because they're pretty(not going to name names for the sake of them showing up in a Google search). Space needs to capture hearts and minds and bring the focus back to the things that matter: science, exploration, human triumph and achievement; men and women working together to do the impossible.
That's space.
Save practicality for later, when we've won their hearts and minds and changed the direction of history for the better.
Space exploration is certainly inspirational, and for manned missions it is certainly dangerous. It is also very expensive. Practicality has to be designed in right from the start due to those costs. We are no longer in an era of national sentiment consisting of fear of a Soviet Union, that was willing to finance Apollo. SpaceX, et al, have to face the bottom line with their decisions, too (Arguably even more so). Depending upon whose program/equipment is being used, and the nature of its funding, it may make sense to return to the moon before going to Mars. If some billionaire tourist(s) see fit to fund trips to, or at least around the moon, that looks like a good deal for a private outfit like SpaceX. Evidently, there are some people sufficiently inspired by a trip around the moon enough that they are willing to spend their own money to do it (At least one, any ways). I sincerely doubt you will be hearing any "Meh" like sentiments from them.