>Fusion power doesn't need the kind of incremental advances and smart marketing that Musk's companies have benefitted from, it needs huge fundamental advances in science and engineering.
It is systems engineering - take the available science and engineering and combine into an actually working thing. That is exactly what we need with fusion today.
> take the available science and engineering and combine into an actually working thing
This doesn’t describe the present situation. For example, high-temperature superconducting magnets open design space which simply didn’t exist a decade or two ago.
Not really. For example, no one has ever tried to extract even a milliwatt of power from a fusion reactor. We have some good ideas how to do it, but it's just never been attempted, so we might discover some fundamental challenges.
Then, even if all current plans go right, current designs have no realistic hopes of being economical. Plants will cost extreme amounts of money, as they require state of the art technology at every level, and the irradiation caused by the fusion reaction will turn all materials in close contact with the fusion core brittle (reactor vessel, support structure, possibly even magnets) in a few years, requiring a complete replacement.
Not to mention, an accident can easily be catastrophic for the entire reactor, making the whole thing an extremely risky endeavor. Even the environmental risk is large, even if not nearly as bad as fission - if such an explosion occurs, it will send radioactive materials (concrete, steel, cooling agents), plus radioactive tritium, all around the plant, requiring expensive cleanup and risking the future of the whole plant.
It is systems engineering - take the available science and engineering and combine into an actually working thing. That is exactly what we need with fusion today.