Elon Musk went all in for Donald Trump, and Democrats have hated him for it ever since.
Democrats swear they only want to hold him accountable with a few oversight hearings.
And Musk just heard what one Clinton Cabinet veteran really has planned for his companies.
A Clinton Cabinet Veteran Wants Uncle Sam to Grab the Rockets
Robert Reich, who ran the Labor Department under Bill Clinton, sat down with host Heather Lofthouse on The Coffee Klatch podcast and blew right past the hearings.
He wants the whole company.
“We’ve got to defund Musk,” Reich said, before claiming that “75% of his wealth is dependent on taxpayers who are buying Starlink systems for the Department of Defense.” But Reich offered no source for that figure, and Musk built much of his fortune on Tesla, which sells cars to private buyers by the millions.
And the defunding talk turned out to be the warm-up act. Reich told Democrats to get moving now, “not just with oversight hearings, but also laying the groundwork for nationalizing Starlink and SpaceX. Nationalize it.”
“It should be a public corporation,” Reich went on. “We should not ever have that kind of power in one person’s hands, one private person’s hands.”
So what set him off? Reich answered that one himself. “Musk is trying to buy the senator from Texas. Why should we allow this, seriously?”
Read that again. Reich’s grievance boils down to Musk spending money on candidates Reich doesn’t like, and his remedy is taking the man’s company away.
Musk didn’t sit still for it. “Stealing companies is a serious crime. Prison for Reich,” he fired back on X.
Musk was swinging for the fences, of course. Floating a lousy idea on a podcast isn’t a crime, and nobody plans to haul a retired Berkeley professor off in handcuffs. But Musk read the intent just fine.
Reich Spelled Out the Lawfare Plan Word for Word
The part of the interview that should worry every Trump voter got far less attention.
“Well, he knows that if the Democrats take over the House and possibly the Senate, one of the things they are going to be doing is focusing on Elon Musk,” Reich said. “I mean, he’s really going to be targeted, and he knows it.”
Targeted. Reich picked that word himself, and it describes a hit list a lot better than an investigation.
And Reich even griped that Musk would defend himself, warning that “he’s going to use litigation.” Think about that for a second. In Reich’s telling, a private citizen hiring lawyers to fight off the federal government counts as part of the scandal.
Lofthouse insisted the whole effort amounts to “accountability.” But Reich lumped Musk in with a Russian dictator, telling her, “I’m talking about Putin and Musk and Trump.” Accountability rarely comes with Vladimir Putin stapled to the top of the list.
Reich has been climbing this ladder for a while. In a 2024 column for the Guardian, he wrote that “Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” and he urged Washington to cancel its SpaceX contracts.
Threaten arrest. Cut the contracts. Seize the company. The punishment keeps growing while the offense never changes: Musk says things, and funds people, that the Left can’t stand.
Harry Truman Already Tried This, and the Supreme Court Said No
And Democrats already tested this theory once, with a far better excuse than Reich has.
In April 1952, with American troops fighting in Korea, President Harry Truman ordered his Commerce Secretary, Charles Sawyer, to take over the nation’s steel mills to head off a strike. Truman figured a war gave him all the authority he needed.
The Supreme Court disagreed, 6-3. Justice Hugo Black, a Franklin Roosevelt appointee, wrote that “the Founders of this Nation entrusted the lawmaking power to the Congress alone in both good and bad times.”
Truman had a shooting war on his hands. Reich has a beef over campaign checks.
Then there’s the Fifth Amendment, which bars the government from taking private property “for public use, without just compensation.” Even a Congress stuffed with Reich’s friends would have to pay for SpaceX, and that bill would land on the very taxpayers Reich claims Musk is bleeding dry.
Funny how that works.
Government Rockets Once Left American Astronauts Begging Moscow for a Ride
But before anyone gets misty-eyed about government-run spaceflight, remember how that chapter closed.
NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011 and then spent years buying seats on Russian Soyuz capsules for American astronauts, at tens of millions of dollars a pop. The country that planted a flag on the Moon had to call the Kremlin for a lift.
SpaceX ended that humiliation in May 2020, when its Crew Dragon carried Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley from Florida to the International Space Station.
And when Boeing’s Starliner capsule ran into thruster trouble in 2024, NASA decided in August of that year to bring astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home on a SpaceX Dragon instead. They finally splashed down in March 2025.
Reich published his threaten-him-with-arrest column within days of that NASA decision.
Starlink also stepped in after Hurricane Helene tore through western North Carolina, offering free service to folks cut off without power. A whole lot of mountain families never stopped to ask who the company’s owner voted for.
Which Republican Donor Lands on the List After Musk?
It’s tempting to write Reich off as a cranky professor with a podcast microphone. He holds no office. He couldn’t nationalize a lemonade stand.
But the idea didn’t start with him. The socialist magazine Jacobin ran a piece in June 2025 calling for “an immediate nationalization of SpaceX and Starlink,” and Robert Kuttner of the left-wing American Prospect wrote that same month that nationalizing the company was “a better idea” than simply backing its competitors.
The Democratic Socialists of America platform goes further, calling for public ownership of the largest corporations in the country. Karl Marx would recognize the blueprint.
Hugo Chavez ran that play in Venezuela, seizing the national phone company, the biggest steel maker, and cement producers in 2007 and 2008. Millions of Venezuelans eventually fled the wreckage.
Maybe that comparison goes a step too far. Reich isn’t Chavez, and Washington, DC isn’t Caracas, at least not yet. But the logic matches: a businessman crosses the wrong politicians, and the state decides his company belongs to “the public.”
Musk makes the easiest first target because he’s the richest and the loudest. A Democrat majority that gets comfortable punishing one donor’s businesses would have a long list of other names to work through.
So if Democrats grab the gavels and start laying Reich’s groundwork, whose company gets nationalized after SpaceX?
Sources: RealClearPolitics, “Robert Reich: Democrats Should ‘Defund Musk,’ Start ‘Laying Groundwork To Nationalize Starlink And SpaceX’” (Tim Hains, October 25, 2026); Fox News, “Ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich claims Elon Musk ‘out of control,’ says regulators should ‘threaten arrest’”; The Heritage Foundation, “The Left’s Open Declaration of War on Free Speech”; Jacobin, “We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink” (June 2025); The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner (June 2025); National Constitution Center, “The Youngstown Case: Three Approaches to Interpreting Presidential Power”; ABA Journal, “April 8, 1952: Truman seizes steel mills”; Reason, “When Courts Kill Executive Orders”; Scientific American, “After 286 Days in Space, NASA Astronauts Return to Earth with a Splash”; NASA, Butch Wilmore biography; The New Criterion.