How can he make money from Steem? Without our help, all he can do is sell his tokens. He might recover his money, but he won't make any that way.

Justin Sun acts like early days Microsoft, buying companies just to get some market share (and shutting down those companies). He can just use steemit.com to convert the most "non-crypto" part of STEEM community into the TRON network users.

If he invested 10M for the ninjamined STEEM stake + steemic.com website, he just needs to create +10M in value for the TRON network. It doesn't matter (for him) if STEEM value goes to 0. He still has steemit.com and just needs a mechanism that let current STEEM based users to be onboarded to TRON.

So he has no real incentive to act as a "benevolent dictator" towards the STEEM chain, he just needs to play "benevolent dictator" for steemit.com users and figure out how to replace the "chain" into TRON.

Microsoft has a history of doing this, he is trying to play that kind of game.