Robert Reich, Fulfilling the GOP’s Warnings About Socialism, Tells Democrats To ‘Nationalize’ SpaceX

President Clinton’s labor secretary, Robert Reich, is urging Democrats to “defund” the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and start “laying the groundwork for nationalizing Starlink and SpaceX.” The remarks are a gift to the GOP, boosting their midterm message that a victory by Democrats heralds a slide into a socialist dystopia.“When I say, ‘Defund Musk,’” Mr. Reich told the “Coffee Klatch” podcast on Saturday, “75 percent of his wealth is dependent on taxpayers.” He didn’t attribute the 75 percent figure to any source or acknowledge that the government pays SpaceX and uses its Starlink to do what NASA cannot. “Stealing companies,” Mr. Musk replied on X, “is a serious crime. Prison for Reich.”Mr. Reich envies Mr. Musk the same way. “We should not ever have that kind of power in one person’s hands,” he said before adding a qualifier: “One private person’s hands.” The implication is that government ought to be unchallenged, a vision counter to the way the Constitution diffuses power.The former secretary of labor, Robert Reich, on January 16, 2014 at Washington, D.C. Win McNamee/Getty ImagesAccording to the Washington Post in February 2025, Presidents Obama and Biden delivered the vast majority of government support for Mr. Musk, believing the private sector could deliver EVs faster. In 2015, Mr. Musk told CNBC that Tesla Motors Inc. was not “getting some huge check,” only incentives to advance Mr. Obama’s energy goals.Government subsidies “are catalysts,” Mr. Musk said, “that improve the rate at which a certain thing happens” rather than making them manifest. Mr. Musk was then a darling of the left. Now, Mr. Reich says that he “represents the power of oligarchy in America over democracy,” comparing him to the “robber barons” of “the First Gilded Age.”Yet the biggest businessman in the Gilded Age, John Pierpont Morgan, bailed out the government in 1895 during a run on the Treasury, saving the country. In August of last year, Mr. Reich defended a company that Morgan founded, United States Steel, fearing a nationalization by President Trump that never came to pass, even though the government’s ownership stake gives Uncle Sam significant managerial power.Fedor Encke, portrait of Pierpont Morgan, detail, 1903. Via Wikimedia CommonsMr. Reich, on his Substack, writes that Mr. Trump would be acting as a “dictator” and a “neofascist” if he took full control of U.S. Steel. The secretary allows that if this form of “‘state capitalism’ were proposed by Democrats or progressives, it would be considered socialism or communism,” a definition that now fits his plans for SpaceX.SpaceX, Mr. Reich said, “should be a public corporation,” exclaiming, “Nationalize it.” Mr. Musk, however, won’t be the only one whose property is confiscated. Those who hold shares would forfeit them, and there’s no reason to believe that the theft would stop with Mr. Musk.The conceit that government can remove the brains of an operation without ill effect has a parallel in President Hoover. Known as “the Doctor of Sick Mines,” he brought his talents and capital to Russia’s copper industry in the early 20th Century. His new technology and methods brought forth ore that had been out of reach.By 1912, Hoover’s operations were valued at almost $1 billion, equal to about $35 billion today. But after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the founding dictator of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, decided that communists ought to own the mines and confiscated Hoover’s properties.A number of Hoover’s technicians were executed as “bourgeois.” The machines they’d maintained failed. Furnaces, the future president wrote in his memoirs, “froze” and the system collapsed within a week. Hoover called the USSR a “murderous tyranny” built upon the “criminal instinct” to steal.Mr. Reich has given voters who escaped socialist disasters, or learned their lessons, a reason to heed the GOP’s campaign warnings. They know that the government would run SpaceX into the ground as surely as Lenin did Hoover’s mines. Many, as Churchill did, will steer clear of candidates who believe that nationalizing things is the path to prosperity.

Robert Reich, Fulfilling the GOP’s Warnings About Socialism, Tells Democrats To ‘Nationalize’ SpaceX

Robert Reich, Fulfilling the GOP’s Warnings About Socialism, Tells Democrats To ‘Nationalize’ SpaceX

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