Lol. None of this had to do with Musk. I don't know why you brought him up.

The woman in the video is the one who brought him up.

You can't just maneuver a space elevator. The entire way it works is it sits at one point. The amount of forces it'd put on the structure to maneuver it is insane, especially if it has to be in time to avoid a hurricane. It has to stay at the equator

OK, you've got space elevators wrong, and that's OK.

In most designs the base station sits on a moving platform in the ocean. That way it can be moved around to avoid things like storms. This doesn't put much extra force at all on the cable, because the cable is very, very long, and as a consequence even a large movement at any given point is only a small change in terms of angles.

The cable itself is also flexible, which means that even with a stationary base station it could be maneuvered to avoid collisions by pushing on it along its length.

Trash can't be maneuvered. We don't even know where 100% of it is.

By the time we'd actually be building a space elevator we would also undoubtedly be a lot more capable and motivated to track orbital debris along its path, and probably also able to clean it up.

You can't shield the cable. The weight of the cable is the entire issue why we need insane materials to build it. If you add shielding then you're adding to the weight, and therefor multiplying the size the cable needs to be.

Shielding can be very light and it would be in space, probably only along high-risk segments. In any case, it's mostly an implementation detail that may not actually be necessary anyway.

The people who opened companies "doing research" into it have all shut down. Either it was a scam or they realized it isn't possible.

This means absolutely nothing. Quarterly capitalism is incompatible with extremely long-term projects like space elevators, is this news to you? Nobody sane actually expects a space elevator to be built on a timescale that is of use to investors. Even if we had the requisite materials and technologies and the construction started right now, it would likely take decades to complete.

The people doing materials science adjacent to this are not doing materials science to build a space elevator. They're just trying to come up with new useful materials.

Exactly. Where did I claim otherwise? My point is that the research has been done to show that it's physically possible and what the approximate material requirements would be. Material science research has shown us that materials that can meet those requirements exist (carbon nanotubes, diamond nanothreads), but currently can't be produced at scale. Thankfully such materials would also be incredibly useful for a great many other purposes, so materials research labs can stay in business investigating how to manufacture them at scale, and at some point in the future once they can be manufactured at scale, they may be used for constructing a space elevator.

Again, how is this unusual to you? This is how literally all technological development works. Theory will show that some technology is physically possible decades or even centuries before practice catches up and makes it practically possible, and after that manufacturing and economical realities may or may not make it practically feasible.

One could argue that a space elevator will never be practically feasible because e.g. launching rockets will always be cheaper, or even that it'll never be practically possible because e.g. manufacturing the necessary quantities of advanced nanomaterials will forever be out of reach -- a much more tenuous argument than the first. But no, you've chosen the most tenuous argument of them all, that it is physically impossible -- something theory has already shown to be false.