We’re Making Musk the World’s First Trillionaire With Public Money and Public Assets

11 min: We gave him our dollars, our knowledge, our launchpads, our tech. While people ration insulin, he’s on track to be the first trillionaire—and Democrats are cheering him on.

What if I told you we’re creating the world’s first trillionaire with your tax dollars—and the Democrats are in on it?

The Democratic Party doesn’t just tolerate privatization—they’re ideologically committed to it, even when it means gutting the very tools we need to solve our biggest crises.

They want us to reject candidates like Zohran Mamdani, warning that anything else would be a gift to MAGA. These establishment Democrats are the same ones calling for a return to the middle.

Meanwhile, voters and non-voters alike are asking a more basic question: Are Republicans and Democrats really all that different when it comes to the core economic stuff? If Democrats had total control of state and federal government, what would they actually do?

Because when it comes to our biggest weapons against monopolies and corporate greed—public competition, public ownership, public production—Democrats are in lockstep with Republicans. Neoliberal economics — the idea that the market should run everything and government should stay out — has become a religion for both parties. This is one of the biggest reasons Democrats can’t compete with MAGA. They gave up on government as a builder.

And when you give up on building, you end up outsourcing — to people like Elon Musk. Instead of rebuilding NASA, we privatized it. And now we’re creating the world’s first trillionaire with our own tax dollars — and Democrats are on board.

You want proof?

I'm reading the New York Times yesterday because, you know, I'm a masochist, I suppose. And lo and behold, you got Senator Mark Kelly just lapping on the praise for Elon Musk. And not just lapping on the praise for Elon Musk, but also articulating one of the main problems with the Democratic Party's collective thinking as it stands, which is that the private sector is better, stronger, faster, more.

It just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Mark Kelly says he was skeptical of privatizing spaceflight, but now he's a convert. What he doesn't say is that NASA's "inefficiency" was engineered by decades of budget cuts and constraints. And the company SpaceX, that he's so enamored with for their cost of launching and payload, cost per payload? What they're not counting in that is that we're giving all of our IP to them for free.

We handed over nearly a trillion dollars' worth of infrastructure, research, and expertise that we built as a country and now call it innovation when someone repackages it for profit. NASA has invested approximately $650 billion since 1958, with the Apollo program alone costing $280 billion in today's dollars. And then, surprise surprise, if you give it away, if you give the private industry this massive foundation of assets, infrastructure, and knowledge that was built decade after decade with public effort and ingenuity a private company will make insane profits.

Not only that, they're able to make it look like they're doing it very cheaply because they get tons of fucking subsidies on top of it all. SpaceX has received over $38 billion in direct government contracts, with NASA continuing to fund the company despite missing milestones by up to two years in early development. The company uses Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A, a facility that cost billions to build during the Apollo and Shuttle eras, at substantially below-market rates.

To add insult to injury the dude we are propping up was recently crowned the most dislike man in America by a recent Gallup poll.

If Dems can't go out there and run on destroying SpaceX by relaunching NASA as a major component of our economy, then I think they’ve lost the thread politically speaking, socially speaking, and economically speaking.

It’s insane to be using our cumulative infrastructure, cumulative knowledge, public assets, and public funds to create the world's first trillionaire.

We have tens of thousands of people dying a year because they don't have access to healthcare. We have healthcare bankruptcies. We have crumbling infrastructure. We have a manufacturing industry that is dying on the vine. We're completely dependent on foreign energy. We're completely dependent on foreign supply chains. And we're going to use some of our most valuable assets in this one sector to create a trillionaire? Sadly, this is not unique to our space program, it's happening across the board.

We're worried about SNAP benefits and Medicare, when you've got the most ridiculous giveaway that's ever happened in the history of the country, happening right here for Elon Musk, who we basically universally despise.

You hear all these politicians talking about common sense. This ain’t it.

The biggest problem with the privatization of everything we have is that the idea is embedded in the ideology of the Democratic Party. It’s infected Republicans, mainstream economists, and or business leaders. They religiously believe that the private sector reigns supreme in being able to producing good outcomes for the American people.

The cost is one of our biggest mechanisms for restraining out-of-control capitalism and an ineffective system has been shelved. It means that we've given up, we've sort of disarmed ourselves in terms of creating affordability, in terms of creating more equity, in terms of creating Abundance across our country.

It also means that we've given up our greatest tool to unify as a people behind a common cause and a common mission. Working together to improve our country to save our planet, to save our environment, to save our economy. If the public secotor is bared from competition and forced to give away our IP and our property we cannot reign in the private sector.

Other places do it, other people do it. We need leaders that understand public production is good it’s powerful

So are Democrats the same as Republicans? No, they're not the same as Republicans. I don't think that Democrats have the same authoritarian tendencies. I don't think that there's a movement among the Democrats that are driving us towards a monarchy like there is within a fringe sector of the right. I do not think that the Democrats want to restrict women's access to reproductive rights by and large. I don't think that Democrats want to restrict people's personal sexual freedoms or personal liberties.

But I do think, and this is a big problem, where the Democratic Party and the Republican Party overlap too often, is that they believe wholeheartedly in the supremacy of the free market. They believe wholeheartedly that actually the government's just here to regulate a little bit and provide subsidies to poor people and to rich people, and that the market is God and the market is supreme.

There is a sense that if we just work out how to monitor or regulate our systems more effectively then we can create a system that lifts all boats. But that misses where we shine and what inspires us to do big things, working together as a people to build things.

When you believe the private sector is always better, you give up the tools to fight back against out-of-control capitalism. You can't create affordability when you've handed the keys to profit-maximizing corporations. You can't build equity when you've abandoned the one institution that's supposed to serve everyone equally. You can't solve climate change or save our economy when you've convinced yourself that only private companies can get shit done.

Democrats share in our current plight Bill Clinton signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, declaring Depression-era banking regulations "no longer appropriate." Biden's 2020 campaign received over $74 million from Wall Street, more than Obama's two campaigns combined. BlackRock executives have systematically infiltrated Democratic administrations: Brian Deese went from BlackRock's Global Head of Sustainable Investing to Biden's National Economic Council Director.

When it comes to military spending, Democrats don't just roll over, they beg for more. In September 2021, 14 House Democrats added $24 billion to Biden's defense budget, pushing it to $738.9 billion. These same Democrats collectively received at least $135,000 from the top 10 defense contractors in just the first half of 2021.

The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act passed with 87% of Senate Democrats voting yes for $895.2 billion. When Bernie Sanders proposed cutting military spending by 10%, it failed 11-88, with only six Democrats supporting it.

AIPAC spent over $100 million in the 2024 election cycle, successfully defeating progressive Democrats who questioned unconditional support for Israel. They dumped $25 million against Jamaal Bowman and $8.6 million against Cori Bush, making these the most expensive House primaries in history.

Since 1990, pro-Israel interests have contributed $56.8 million to federal candidates, with Democrats receiving the lion's share in recent cycles.

When 115,000 rail workers prepared to strike for basic human dignity, paid sick days, Biden forced them back to work. The workers had rejected a deal with zero dedicated sick days.

Even the so-called progressive "Squad" betrayed workers. AOC, Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman, and Ayanna Pressley all voted to break the strike. Biden prioritized "economic stability", code for corporate profits, over workers' basic rights.

Obama promised in 2007 that "the first thing I'd do as president" would be signing the Freedom of Choice Act. By April 2009, with a Democratic supermajority, Obama declared abortion rights "not the highest legislative priority." Fifty years of fundraising off abortion rights, and when Democrats had the power, they chose not to use it.

In 2021-2022, Democrats again controlled Congress and the presidency but failed to eliminate the filibuster for reproductive rights. When they finally held votes, predictably, Joe Manchin joined Republicans.

Biden supported Clinton's plan to lay off 252,000 federal workers. Obama's Education Secretary doubled down on charter school growth through Race to the Top. The Heritage Foundation praised Clinton in 1997 for pursuing "the boldest privatization agenda put forth by any American president".

Even SpaceX's government teat-sucking gets bipartisan applause. Democrats received at least $567,000 from SpaceX's PAC in 2024, with Senator Martin Heinrich defending the relationship: "My wife drives a Tesla."

When it comes to healthcare, if you cannot understand that other developed nations not only have single payer healthcare systems, but many of them have high percentages of publicly owned infrastructure, then you're missing the point entirely.

In Germany, approximately 41% of hospital are publicly owned. Canada just built a pharmaceutical company that's owned by the Canadian government. What this means is they're saying, hey, private market, you cannot fuck us over completely. You cannot rake us over the coals. And if you do, then there's an option. There's a publicly owned option, publicly owned pharmaceutical companies.

If insulin is going to be $500 a pop, and it only costs $4 to make it, then we'll just make it ourselves. The idea that we can't get out there and compete is crazy talk. We can compete.

We've been told for decades that government is inefficient, that the private sector always does it better, that public ownership is socialism. But look around the world, countries with strong public sectors have better healthcare outcomes, lower costs, and higher satisfaction.

The difference isn't that their governments are magically better. The difference is they never bought into the ideology that disarmed them from using the most powerful tool they have: collective action through democratic institutions.

If you can't go out there and say that, yes, actually, the government can compete with private sector, and we can do it well, then you fundamentally misunderstand any levers that we have to bring costs down and quality of life up. And not for nothing I think you’re missing some Democratic Party DNA.

Americans do best when we have a project to work on together.

I talk more about how we can rebuild public capacity on my YouTube channel - going live Tuesday through Thursday, 7-9 pm ET

And we’ve got so much work to do. We need to save our environment, our healthcare, our education system, our immigration system, our democracy, and our economy. But to anccompl these things we need to unify as a people behind a common cause and a common mission to do so.

Thanks to the Trump administration and this MAGA movement, they have taken apart so many elements of our government, so many elements of our system, that they are ready to be rebuilt. But they need to be rebuilt deliberately, behind a vision.

Rebuilt without the revolving doors. Rebuilt so they can actually compete with the private sector, not just regulate it or subsidize it. We need public options that can go head-to-head with corporations and win. We need to remember that the public sector isn't just a safety net. It's our most powerful tool for creating the society we actually want to live in.