I remember attending a talk on the space elevator (besides the Japanese project), and they were thinking about using a laser on the ground to shoot at the bottom on the elevator to power it up.

If it works, the trip up the elevator will probably take a couple hours, if not the whole day. When you have a bunch of people idling around for a long time, they'll want to do stuff. And in doing stuff, they might want to spend money. I can imagine the space elevator selling a part of its limited space to a store selling binoculars to look down at the earth. Or maybe some other entity like walmart or starbucks.