Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich has a plan to fix the economy. Step one is taking a rocket company. He says this is about democracy, which is the first time "democracy" has been used to describe a repo job.
On an October 24 episode of his podcast, The Coffee Klatch, Reich told Democrats to "defund Musk" and start "laying the groundwork for nationalizing Starlink and SpaceX." His reasoning: "75% of his wealth is dependent on taxpayers who are buying Starlink systems for the Department of Defense."
Fox Business noted Reich offered no evidence for the 75 percent. That's fine. Neither does the federal budget.
Let's run the numbers, because somebody has to.
Under the current arrangement, the government pays a private company for satellites that work. Under the Reich arrangement, the government owns the company, pays itself, and the satellites work exactly as long as the next continuing resolution. That's not a savings. That's a subscription with a hostage clause.
Washington already owns businesses. It owns the Postal Service, which raises the price of a stamp roughly as often as you change your smoke detector battery. It owns Amtrak, which has been on the federal books since 1971 and still treats arriving on time as a stretch goal. Now Reich wants to add a rocket company, a product whose entire value proposition is that it is supposed to go up.
Elon Musk answered on X: "Stealing companies is a serious crime. Prison for Reich." Reich did not file a counterclaim. He filed a column.
In The Guardian on October 27, Reich wrote that defunding Musk "will probably have to wait until after 20 January 2029," when he hopes a new administration will end the contracts, break up the "monopolies," and impose "a significant wealth tax." Until then, he asked readers to stop buying Teslas, quit X, and cancel Starlink.
So the official timeline is: seize the company in 2029, and in the meantime, boycott its internet. That's a hostile takeover on layaway, pickup in 2029.
The accounting gets better. If 75 percent of Musk's wealth comes from Pentagon contracts, as Reich says, the government can end that wealth for free by simply not renewing the contracts. Instead, the plan is to buy the whole company that the contracts supposedly built. That's like canceling your gym membership by purchasing the gym.
Reich's own description of the target was "Exhibit A in terms of the billionaire takeover of America." His solution is a government takeover of the billionaire. Under this model, the oligarchy problem is solved the way a bad roommate solves the rent problem: by moving into your room.
And who runs Nationalized SpaceX? Presumably the same government that once needed months to make a health insurance website load. The first launch would require a 900-page environmental review, a community input session, and a launch window that closes at 4:30 p.m. sharp, Monday through Thursday.
Meanwhile, the taxpayer who already paid for the satellites gets to pay again for the company, then a third time for the wealth tax's compliance office. Three bills, one rocket. That's not public ownership. That's paying for the same couch three times because you keep moving apartments.
The bottom line, and it is a bottom line: Reich wants to make SpaceX a "public corporation," and he's willing to wait until 2029 to do it. Which makes it the only federal project in history that announced its delay before it announced its budget.
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The Demorat is a satire publication. This article is parody and commentary based on real news reports; jokes, exaggerations and fictional elements are not factual claims. Quotes attributed to real people are drawn from published reporting.
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