Reports about the daily drama of the second Trump administration often feel less like normal political news than recaps of a reality TV show. This is an administration where the actual official name of the president’s signature legislation is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance regularly beefs with mid-tier journalists on social media, and when Trump and Vance dressed down Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Trump actually said the words, “This is going to be great television.”
It was only to be expected that, when the Trump/Elon Musk bromance finally soured, things got very personal and very ugly. Media coverage and social media commentary have tended to focus on the respects in which this too is “great television.” But the threats and counterthreats about Musk’s government contracts have been a vivid demonstration of how deeply enmeshed the billionaire’s business empire is with the American state. We should be able to step back from the immediate absurdities of the Trump Show to recognize that this is a much larger problem.
There’s no reason it has to be like this. We don’t need to have a privatized space program propped up by state funding. We don’t need vital satellite internet infrastructure to be controlled, through that company, by a single ultrawealthy individual. We can just nationalize SpaceX.
Trump vs. Musk
The Trump/Musk alliance, for a time, served both men’s interests well. Musk was by far the most important Republican donor of 2024, and it’s entirely possible that Trump wouldn’t have won without his support. In turn, during the early months of the administration, Trump handed the keys of government to Musk’s “Department” of Government Efficiency, and regulatory agencies that had been investigating Musk’s businesses were gutted one by one.
As good as they were for each other though, the sheer size of the two men’s egos made this perhaps the most widely predicted political breakup in American history. And the implosion has been something to behold.
When Musk started to publicly criticize the One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social that Musk had “gone CRAZY” because the bill cut support for electric vehicles. Musk said that Trump is in the Epstein files. Trump said Musk was out for himself. Musk suggested that Trump should be impeached. Trump posted about how he might end Musk’s subsidies and government contracts. Musk retaliated by threatening to decommission the Dragon spacecraft. That’s not a small threat. As political commentator Matt Stoller has pointed out, this “would harm the International Space Station and hinder U.S. encrypted communications, some of which flow over Musk’s network.”
Trump is a historically unpopular leader who ended his first one hundred days in office with the lowest approval rating of any president in eighty years, and Musk is even less popular. Unsurprisingly then, the reaction of a great many Americans to the public slap fight between the president and his oligarch patron has been to bust out the popcorn and enjoy the show. References to the Alien vs. Predator movies and the “Let Them Fight” meme have filled social media.
But we shouldn’t lose sight of the serious issue. A little schadenfreude about your enemies flinging mud at each other is only natural. But the fact that the threats and counterthreats about SpaceX contracts and Dragon are even on the table says something disturbing about our society. Why exactly are we letting the world’s richest man personally control a massive share of what our country, and indeed our species, puts into space?
The Case for Nationalization
SpaceX provides the only vehicle that astronauts use to get on and off the International Space Station. In the last quarter of 2023, a jaw-dropping 90 percent of pounds sent into orbit were put there by SpaceX. As Stoller notes, by any reasonable standards that makes it “a monopolist in launching satellites.” And SpaceX’s operation of the Starlink service turns the existence of a heavily state-subsidized private space program (which is bad enough) into something far worse. Whatever you think of the war in Ukraine, for example, it’s absurd that Elon Musk’s personal decisions about sharing Starlink terminals with the Ukrainian military make a real difference to the course of that war. Starlink being owned by SpaceX, and SpaceX being owned by Musk, means that a single oligarch de facto gets to set his own privatized foreign policy.
Steve Bannon, of all people, has made the very reasonable suggestion that the Defense Production Act could be used as a legal basis for nationalizing SpaceX. Bannon, of course, is an archreactionary, and he’s only floated a temporary takeover “until we can get some stable management.” But why shouldn’t we just have this key part of the space program, which comes with militarily important satellite internet infrastructure, in public hands on an ongoing basis?
None of the usual arguments against nationalization hold much water in this case. SpaceX isn’t one firm among many jostling to get ahead in a vibrantly competitive marketplace. It’s a behemoth that, as of last September, owned two-thirds of the satellites in space and a ridiculous share of internet traffic, and it’s been repeatedly accused of monopolistic practices. Nor are the company’s profits organically created by the free market. Any story about SpaceX as a font of private innovation because it’s free from state interference would be hard to square with the economic reality of the many billions it’s reaped from its numerous contracts, some public and some classified, with NASA and the Department of Defense. Without that, SpaceX in anything like its current form would be unthinkable.
There are two core differences between public money being used to fund a corporate giant to provide what would be state functions in any normal society and the same money being spent in-house on a publicly owned version of SpaceX. One is that we wouldn’t have a big portion of that money being funneled into Elon Musk’s net worth and the portfolios of Tesla’s big institutional investors like Founders Fund and Draper Fisher Jurvertson. The other is that it would be brought into the sphere of democracy.
Decisions about where Starlink terminals would be sent, when or if important spacecrafts would be decommissioned, and the rest would be made institutionally by whatever department or agency housed it, which would in turn answer to and follow the directives of the elected branches of government. They wouldn’t be hostage to the whims of a single oligarch.
It’s time for an immediate nationalization of SpaceX and Starlink.