It never fails here. Ya'll are soooo determined to assume ulterior motivations. He has always been direct about his motivations, whether it's about politics or business decisions.
To suspect his whole plan for datacenters in space is a ruse or something to drive up some stock price (or whatever), is... just ridiculous. You really think they person who leads SpaceX (more satellites than the rest of the world combined) and Xai (with a competitive frontier model in 2 years starting from scratch), and Tesla (more inference compute than any company on Earth) really knows less than you about the math and physics of this idea??
His immediate focus for Starship has shifted from Mars colonisation to exponential expansion of intelligence, as he thinks it's the best path to extend consciousness. Ridiculous or not, he believes that, and that's the motivation.