There's Only One Way to Bring Elon Musk Down

We have to nationalize the tech industry and kick the oligarchs out.

Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

This is how it’s going to go: Elon Musk’s foray into buying a government for himself and all of his dumbest friends will be replicated, over and over again, by successive titans of industry with varying social politics. As the all-out push toward artificial intelligence and market consolidation continues, these titans will come increasingly from tech companies, hedge funds, and private equity firms. They will wield their power against critical media, rivals, and government officials around the world until they get what they want, which is not only total control but complete subservience as well.

Eventually, we won’t have a federal government anymore — just an empty husk that continues to bleed poor and middle-class people dry to fund moronic land grabs, no-bid contracts for cronies, and subsidies promising jobs and economic benefits that don’t materialize anywhere except in executive compensation. Meanwhile: the hospitals close, the schools are privatized, and companies are given free rein to rip you off.

As anyone watching Musk's rampage through Washington can see, the capture of the Republican Party by this oligarchy is complete. But Democrats are itching to get a piece of the action too. If you don’t believe me, take a look at this recent Politico report on House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries meeting with Silicon Valley donors to “mend fences.”

“There is a significant fear that these tech folks, who have been with us for a long time, will say, ‘fuck it, we’re going with the other guys,’” said Alex Hoffman, a Democratic donor adviser who works with donors across the country but did not attend the event. “These donors are also pissed, watching former and current colleagues have unlimited, unchecked power, and getting richer off of this and they’re not.”

What do you get the Silicon Valley overlord who already has everything? Their own government, not only to influence but effectively to rule over. And having had their way with both parties for decades at this point — a select few former Biden officials notwithstanding — why should they think this is an unreasonable request?

There’s only one way to prevent this: dramatically reducing the power of the tech sector, which has grown too big to answer to the people or their government.

Between them, Musk's SpaceX and Tesla have received $18 billion in contracts from the federal government over the past decade. And Democrats were far more generous to Musk than Republicans; by the end of Joe Biden's term, ABC News recently reported, the handouts were nearly four times the size they were at the end of Trump's first term. The first year Biden was in office, SpaceX got a $1.8 billion classified defense contract. In 2022, the Biden administration awarded Musk’s companies, mostly SpaceX, $2.78 billion in federal contracts; that same year, the Wall Street Journal reported, SpaceX lost more than half a billion dollars.

The further back you go, the more you find the government’s hands keeping Musk’s company above water; in 2013, the U.S. Export-Import Bank approved more than $105 million in loans to finance a communications satellite built by Israeli weapons manufacturer IAI to launch aboard a Falcon 9 flight. Three years later, both the rocket rocket and the satellite exploded on the launch pad.

That’s not counting all of the state and local payouts Musk's gotten either, like the hundreds of millions in subsidies from California, or the nearly $1 billion New York state spent to build him the Gigafactory in Buffalo; an audit by the state comptroller found “54 cents of economic benefit for every subsidy dollar spent on the factory.”

“[Musk] definitely goes where there is government money,” an analyst told the Los Angeles Times in 2015. “That’s a great strategy, but the government will cut you off one day.” The analyst was right about Musk, but wrong about the government. Nobody, it seems, ever wants to cut Musk off. Now we're seeing the consequences of shoveling billions of dollars into this giant baby’s pocket and telling him he’s a genius for more than a decade:

Musk, of course, went public as a neo-Bircher almost as soon as the government money started getting a little more tightly regulated — his companies have been investigated by five different Cabinet departments and seven different independent federal agencies for violations related to worker safety and labor rights, discrimination, antitrust, and more, the New York Times reported in October. The Federal Aviation Administration ordered Musk’s Starship program grounded after a test flight exploded; Musk forced the FAA administrator to quit three days after Trump took office again.

It’s remarkably rich for someone who’s taken this much from the government and failed to deliver time and again now claims to be the arbiter of waste and fraud in the government, but that’s the point. He thinks he’s better than you, whoever you are: a single mom on SNAP a Walmart employee on Medicaid, a career civil servant who committed the fireable offense of attending a mandatory diversity training encouraged by Trump’s first Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.

At this point, all we have to show for all of the money we’ve plowed into Elon Musk is an emerging kleptocracy and a state careening toward failure. And it's not just Musk: our day-to-day lives, as well as the infrastructure of our government and our society, are at the mercy of a handful of unaccountable billionaires.

This cannot go on. The tech industry is too big, too powerful, and too unregulated, and, like all big, powerful, unregulated industries, it has to be humbled and made to serve the people rather than a few robber barons. A great way to start would be for the federal government to take a controlling stake in Musk's companies and boot him out of leadership. As Kate Aronoff and others have suggested, this would allow us to protect our substantial investment. And once Musk was dealt with, we could move on to all of the other tech monopolies that dominate our lives.

This isn't just a practical or financial necessity. Our democracy is being destroyed, and our basic social contract is on life support. If we don't move urgently and forcefully to take power away from these oligarchs, our future will be even bleaker than it already is. It's either us or them. There's no in-between.