Communist-in-conservative clothing Jonathan V. Last, editor of the Bulwark, has joined Munchkin Robert Reich, a former labor secretary, in calling for the nationalization of Space X.
I’ve been making the case for nationalizing SpaceX for years, but I’ve never put the arguments all in one place. That’s what we’re doing today. Let’s stipulate that this newsletter won’t have all the answers. It’s a starting point for deeper discussions. But a longstanding reality is suddenly obvious to people:
SpaceX is a national security vulnerability. Something must be done about it.
Two things up front: First, my headline is “Nationalize SpaceX,” but that’s shorthand. I don’t know that we need to “nationalize” the company, per se. Maybe we do! Or maybe it needs to be broken up! Or aggressively regulated!
Last denies this is about Musk, writing, “we should divorce the person of Elon Musk from this conversation. Musk is a uniquely dangerous individual and the fact that he controls SpaceX increases the national security risks. But the risks would still exist no matter who controlled the company. Imagine a wise, beneficent trillionaire instead. If he controlled SpaceX outright, it would still be an unacceptable risk for America.”
But Last is not calling for the nationalization of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, or RTX (née Raytheon), all of which are much more vital to the defense of our nation.
He is calling for nationalizing the company that owns Twitter. Musk bought it, renamed it X and made it part of SpaceX. That in hindsight was a genius move because any attempt to nationalize SpaceX now becomes a First Amendment issue.
There is a Fifth Amendment issue as well—“nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Where will Congress find the $2 trillion to take Space X?
Twitter may be the real target of their disaffection.
When Musk bought Twitter, Last wrote, “For years I’ve tried arguing my friends off of Twitter. I’ve appealed to their intellects, their decency, the fate of their eternal souls, and their time management compulsions. It’s never worked. I have not talked a single person off of Twitter.
“That’s because the incentives are real. If you’re a writer and you don’t do Twitter, you might as well not exist. And because the incentives are real and powerful, we were never going to kill Twitter by convincing people to leave the platform. But maybe Elon will kill Twitter for us by accident.”
In Last’s mind, the world’s first trillionaire is a bungling idiot.
Last wrote, “He’s going to need to cut spending (meaning: employees) by something in the neighborhood of half. He will simultaneously need to pursue aggressive, immediate revenue growth (meaning: user growth). In short, Musk’s financial incentives—dictated to him by the hilariously bad deal he negotiated—mean that he probably has to make Twitter even worse.”
Musk cut the staff by 84%. It is better and it survives. This embitters communists who want us to follow the yellow brick road. Robert Reich is my only example.
Reich said on his podcast, “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.”
Fact-check: Reich is full of shit.
In 2025, SpaceX reported about $18.7 billion in total revenue. U.S. federal agencies (NASA, Department of Defense, GSA, and intelligence agencies) accounted for roughly 20% of that—on the order of $4 billion in revenue. NASA paid the bulk of that.
That compares with RTX, which in 2025 reported $33.28 billion in sales to the U.S. government out of $88.60 billion total revenue—38%.
Reich seems most upset by Musk buying Twitter. After Musk bought 10% of the company, Reich wrote, “Musk says he wants to ‘free’ the internet. But what he really aims to do is make it even less accountable than it is now, when it’s often impossible to discover who is making the decisions about how algorithms are designed, who is filling social media with lies, who’s poisoning our minds with pseudo-science and propaganda, and who’s deciding which versions of events go viral and which stay under wraps.
“Make no mistake: this is not about freedom. It’s about power.”
By accountability, Reich and his fellow travelers mean they control it, not the man who invested $44 billion in it.
However, do not discount the likelihood that they just want to shut down our space program as they did 50 years ago when they stopped manned expeditions to the moon and decided not to seek Mars.
NASA spending went from 4.4% of the budget in 1966 to 1.6% five years later to 0.35% today.
The argument was we should fix the problems on Earth before heading into space. Ralph Abernathy said, “$12 a day to feed an astronaut. We could feed a starving child for $8.”
Yes, feeding an adult costs more than feeding a child because adults eat more. Since then, we’ve replaced childhood malnutrition with childhood obesity.
The reason for the loony move to stop our space program in the 1970s was to protect the Soviet Union from our domination. Now the Democrat objective is protecting Red China from competition. They want to buy SpaceX just to destroy it.
There is a third reason why Last, the Little Man and the rest want to destroy Musk. They hate success outside of politics. I believe the scientific name for this is jealousy.
At any rate, it is bad public policy to spend $2 trillion—$2,000,000,000,000—purchasing a company when the money could better be used to pay down the national debt.
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This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
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