Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich went on the air this week to call for a future Democratic administration to nationalize SpaceX and Starlink, turning Elon Musk's private enterprises into state-run public corporations. His remarks, first surfaced by the Washington Examiner's Restoring America column and carried by the outlet's @dcexaminer account, are being treated by conservative commentators less as fringe venting than as a signal of where the party's base wants to go.
"We've got to defund Musk … when I say defund Musk, you know, 75% of his wealth is dependent on taxpayers who are buying Starlink systems for the Department of Defense," Reich said. "If we have a Democratic administration, the Democrats ought to be starting this — not just with oversight hearings, but also starting, laying the groundwork for nationalizing Starlink and SpaceX. Nationalize it. It should be a public corporation. We should not ever have that kind of power in one person's hands."
Reich went further, alleging that Musk is "buying, trying to buy the senator from Texas" and asking, "why would we, why should we allow this? Seriously. Well, we shouldn't."
The Washington Examiner's Restoring America column, written by Brady Leonard, argued that dismissing Reich's proposal as far-left spleen-venting would be a mistake. The column's framing — that Democrats could use President Trump's own expansion of government ownership to justify nationalizing SpaceX and Starlink — was picked up and pushed out through the outlet's @dcexaminer account, which carries roughly 374,000 followers.
The call to nationalize Musk's companies did not stay confined to one cable segment. Coverage of the same subject has spread across outlets in the days since. The Washington Sun reported that Democratic Senators Chris Van Hollen and Robert Garcia want to close what the outlet called the "Elon Musk Loophole" in campaign spending — barring the billionaire and others from making campaign contributions while their companies profit from government contracts.
Taken together, the two threads describe a pincer movement: one wing proposing that the government seize Musk's companies outright, the other moving to cut off his ability to spend in politics while those companies hold federal contracts. The Washington Examiner's own follow-up coverage warned that Democrats could use Trump's expansion of government ownership as precedent for nationalizing SpaceX and Starlink, threatening private property and innovation.
Reich's figure that 75% of Musk's wealth depends on taxpayers buying Starlink systems for the Department of Defense was offered without supporting documentation in the segment. The claim that Musk is attempting to buy a senator from Texas was likewise asserted without evidence presented on air. Next News Network could not independently verify the claims made in the segment.
The reaction on the right has centered on the precedent Reich's proposal would set. A sitting former cabinet secretary calling for the state seizure of a private aerospace and satellite communications company — one that holds defense contracts — is a significant escalation in the rhetorical war over Musk, who has become a central target for Democrats since his companies began winning federal work at scale.
SpaceX and Starlink are privately held, and nationalizing them would require an act of Congress and almost certainly a protracted legal fight over property rights and contract law. Reich's proposal did not address those mechanics on air, and no Democratic officeholder has publicly signed onto the nationalization demand. The Van Hollen and Garcia effort, by contrast, is a concrete legislative proposal aimed at campaign finance rather than ownership.
What the sequence shows is how quickly a single cable interview can become a broader line of attack. The Washington Examiner's column gave the segment a news hook and an argument — that dismissiveness is a mistake — and the @dcexaminer account carried it to roughly 374,000 followers. Within a day, the subject had generated follow-up coverage and, separately, a campaign-finance angle from The Washington Sun. The accounts pushing it are not anonymous: they are a major conservative outlet's flagship feed and a column with a named byline.
For conservatives, the episode is a reminder that the push to constrain Musk is arriving on multiple fronts at once — ownership, contracts and political speech — and that the loudest version of the demand, nationalization, is being treated seriously by outlets that could have ignored it.
Our Take
Robert Reich is a former cabinet secretary, not a backbencher with a podcast, and when he says on air that a Democratic administration should lay the groundwork to nationalize SpaceX and Starlink, that is worth taking at face value rather than laughing off. The conservative instinct to dismiss this as cable-news theater is precisely the mistake the Washington Examiner's column warned against. Reich's numbers are asserted, not documented, and no elected Democrat has embraced the nationalization demand outright — but the direction of travel is unmistakable. Van Hollen and Garcia are already moving on the campaign-finance flank, and the party's activist base has spent years treating Musk as an enemy to be broken rather than a contractor to be managed. Republicans should treat the Reich segment as an early draft of what a Democratic administration would attempt, and should be building the legal and legislative firewall now — not after the subpoenas start flying.
