He doesn’t, almost all of SpaceX’s profit is Starlink. On NASA contracts they bid low and lose money to block competition. Elon bid 2.9 billion for a lunar lander so Jeff Bezos’s company wouldn’t get it, and it’s going to cost Elon 4x that much at minimum if he actually has to finish it, which is why he’s trying to kill the moon program.

Early on NASA contracts were funding SpaceX, now he has to pull up that ladder to protect his monopoly, and it’s cheaper to just kill NASA entirely.

He can still get government money but once all the technical people inside the government are gone it would work like Boring Company. Draw some CGI of a space monorail and sell it to congress with no process or oversight and grift off hype and fomo.

They say “artificial sun” because that’s what it is though, there’s no fusion reactions here they’re just microwaving hydrogen to millions of degrees to study the kind of thing that would happen IF somebody runs a fusion reactor for 22 minutes.