I seem to recall seeing that the Japanese had an ongoing project to put up an elevator (fairly soon?) for about $10Bn. But not sure how current that info is.
OK, here’s a report:
Japan is increasingly confident that its sprawling academic and industrial base can solve those issues, and has even put the astonishingly low price tag of a trillion yen (£5 billion) on building the elevator. Japan is renowned as a global leader in the precision engineering and high-quality material production without which the idea could never be possible.
In Ameribux that’s ~$11Bn at current rates.
You have a couple of weeks to get to Redmond, home of MS:
http://spaceelevatorconference.org/default.aspx
