SpaceX Is a De Facto Government Agency. It Should Be Nationalized.

This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the decision to block Ukraine from the high-speed Starlink satellite alerts that enabled it to intercept Russian missiles and drones was made by SpaceX owner Elon Musk, either in conjunction with President Trump or in advance of Trump’s support for the action. Whichever version is more correct, Musk is either making or carrying out a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign and military policy—something that no private citizen has ever done in our 250-year history. 

Winchester made rifles, but it didn’t order the army to use them against native tribes. Boeing made the B-29s, but it didn’t order them to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once the army purchased the Winchesters, and the Air Force, the B-29s, their manufacturers weren’t at the table or in the room where government leaders decided where, when, how—and in the case of Ukraine and Russia, why—they would or wouldn’t be deployed. They weren’t part of the kind of fundamental reorientation of foreign policy that Trump has wrought, in which his narcissistic and thuggish impulses have eclipsed the democratic affinities by which the U.S., at its all too intermittent best, has dealt with other nations.  

The root cause of Elon Musk’s ascent to de facto defense secretary is the federal government’s roughly 45-year practice of contracting out the work it had formerly done itself. During this time, the government has enabled private investor-owned companies to supplement Medicare and private contractors to fight alongside our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. At all levels of American government, public housing has been abandoned, even as the private housing industry has massively failed to construct sufficient affordable housing. Government shipyards have been shut down, so that the nation is now almost entirely dependent on foreign-made and foreign-owned vessels. And when it came to space, NASA relinquished its control of the satellites that surveyed and alerted us to approaching storms, both natural and military, and thereby allowed those functions to be taken over by Elon Musk, with whom Jeff Bezos is striving to compete. 

This month, that has meant Musk has played a key role in attempting to turn the tide in Russia’s favor in its war on Ukraine. This reductio ad absurdum of contracting out is also the result, of course, of the mind-meld between Trump and Musk, who, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out last week, is every bit as racist, xenophobic, and self-interested as our president. 

Today’s business pages are filled with speculation about Musk’s seeking to merge his two largest companies: Tesla and SpaceX, of which his Starlink network is one component. But Starlink and SpaceX provide crucial national security infrastructure that shouldn’t be switched on and off by the whims of its owner. To be sure, under the grotesque misrule of Donald Trump, national security is also governed by the whims of the president, but Musk’s empire will still be in place, and likely just as powerful, when Trump is gone. 

Today, those two narcissistic bigots are charting America’s course in the world. Once Trump departs, one narcissistic bigot—immune, as Trump is not, from public accountability and term limits—will still control a major share of our defense and intelligence infrastructure. No one concerned about our national security should wish that to continue. SpaceX must be nationalized.