Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said on a podcast that Democrats should lay the groundwork for nationalizing SpaceX and Starlink if they win the White House, according to PJ Media. "Defund Musk. I mean this," Reich told host Heather Lofthouse on The Coffee Klatch. "If we have a Democratic administration - and the Democrats ought to be starting this, not just with oversight hearings, but also laying the groundwork for nationalizing Starlink and SpaceX. Nationalize it."
His case rests on money and power. "It should be a public corporation," Reich said. "We should not ever have that kind of power in one person's hands, one private person's hands." He claimed that 75% of Musk's wealth depends on taxpayers who are buying Starlink systems for the Department of Defense, a figure none of the coverage checks.
The government's side of the ledger is large but smaller than that claim implies. The Benton Institute counted $6.45 billion in SpaceX's biggest Space Force awards this year, $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network and $4.16 billion for an airborne target-tracking satellite network. Those contracts show how much of SpaceX's business is the Pentagon's, but nothing in the coverage shows what share of Musk's wealth they represent.
Reich went further than contracts. He called Musk "Exhibit A in terms of the billionaire takeover of America," likened him to "the robber barons of the first Gilded Age" and said Musk "is trying to buy the senator from Texas." When Lofthouse read Musk's recent posts aimed at Democrats, Reich said Musk knows that if Democrats take the House and possibly the Senate, "he's really going to be targeted, and he knows it."
That fits what ZH has been tracking. Democrats are reportedly preparing sweeping investigations of Musk's contracts and DOGE role, and NYU's Scott Galloway predicted "the mother of all subpoenas" on Nov. 4, as we reported. Musk had already warned on Oct. 21, "Live by the sword, die by the sword."
Musk replied to Reich directly on X.
Reich has been on the other side of this before. In August 2025 he wrote on Substack that Trump's state capitalism "would be communism under any other dictator." Where he objected to the government taking stakes in private companies under Trump, he now wants two of them in public hands under a Democrat. The remarks came in a podcast answer, not a policy proposal.