Reich cites roughly $445m in midterms so far, billions in no-bid Pentagon contracts
Robert Reich, a former U.S. secretary of labor, a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and a Guardian US columnist, used a reported Starlink slowdown in Ukraine as the central case for his argument that private wealth should not shape U.S. foreign policy. In The Guardian’s opinion column published October 27, 2026, he wrote: “No private individual should have the power to determine US foreign policy, as Musk has attempted to do in Ukraine.”
Reich’s immediate recommendations were to stop buying Teslas, stop using X, decline Starlink sign-ups and support politicians who promise to defund Musk. He also argued that billionaire wealth should be taxed, big money should be kept out of politics, billionaires should not be allowed to buy major media, and the government should not give them huge military contracts.
Reich built the political case with claims about money moving into electoral politics. He said Musk had so far sunk roughly $445 million into the 2026 midterm election cycle, all to help Republicans retain control of Congress. He called Musk the largest single known donor in the entire midterm elections and asked: “Will he expect a return on his investment?” Reich also said Musk spent a quarter of a billion dollars in 2024 to help Trump win reelection and ended up with access to vast troves of government data, along with billions of dollars’ worth of no-bid contracts with the Pentagon.
Reich described Starlink as key to the military strategy of both the United States and Ukraine. He wrote that Musk had been rewarded with a chainsaw inaptly named the “department of government efficiency” and had used it to destroy USAID and slash other government agencies he did not like.
The episode at the center of the column came from a Wall Street Journal report. Reich cited the Journal’s account that Musk had “ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine.” The decision “sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration, U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter said.” In the October column, Reich wrote that “this month” Musk had slowed “the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network … rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless.”
The Journal also reported that “Musk and Trump discussed the Starlink decision in a call soon after the slowdown became public.” Reich cited another part of the account in which both men had “expressed anger at Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries in recent weeks, which the president blames for high energy prices.” He disputed that account, writing that the high prices were actually due to Trump’s war in Iran.
Musk wrote on Twitter/X “this weekend” that he had pulled the plug because: “Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people.” Reich characterized the statement as an admission that the slowdown had been imposed over Ukraine’s use of Starlink for offensive drone strikes. He asked: “Who gave Musk authority to slow his satellite service in the first place?” He then asked: “So Musk can decide on his own when a foreign country working alongside the United States against a brutal dictator can have access to vital US intelligence?”
Reich rejected the idea that Musk’s record as an innovator settled the case. Referring to Alex Gibney’s documentary, he said Musk did not invent Tesla or X and received plenty of help founding SpaceX. He wrote: “Musk is to innovation what Trump is to governing.”
His treatment of Musk and Trump was openly polemical. Reich called both men “conmen” and “megalomaniacs,” said they loved authoritarians and detested democracy, wrote that neither believed in or harbored any empathy and that both thought nothing of corrupting governments for personal gain. He also wrote: “Both spout bigoted filth all hours of the day and night to hundreds of millions of people.” Reich then said: “Both Musk and Trump are loathsome human beings.”
He asked how two such awful people could become the two most powerful people in the United States, if not the world, and what was about the country in the early 21st century. For now, Reich wrote, the goal of “all sane people” must be to defund both and get them “as far away from politics as possible.”
Reich said Musk had given at least $168 million to Texas super PACs seeking to elect Republican Ken Paxton to the Senate, “despite (or is it because of?)” Paxton’s long record of ethical lapses and legal controversies. He noted that Musk’s businesses were headquartered in Texas and wrote, “so he needs friends there.”
Reich also said Musk had recently pushed to his 242 million followers on X what Reich characterized as a false story: James Talarico, Paxton’s Democratic opponent, was absent from the campaign trail because he had suffered a mental breakdown and was receiving counseling at the Lindner Center of Hope, a mental health center in Ohio. The column said the story had been thoroughly debunked and that security-camera footage showed Talarico at home, not at an Ohio mental-health facility.
Reich separately cited a Wall Street Journal account of New Year’s Eve 2024, reporting that Paxton had partied in Dubai with his extramarital girlfriend and two men whom the column described as fugitives from charges involving about $300 million in U.S. healthcare fraud. Reich said one of the men donated $190,000 to Paxton, including $25,000 after he was indicted.
Reich said the project of defunding Musk would probably have to wait until after January 20, 2029, when, he wrote, “let’s pray, we have a sane administration in Washington that will end all government contracts with him.” He said Musk’s support for rightwing extremists around the world made him a security risk. He proposed using a reinvigorated Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission to break up Musk’s monopolies and imposing a significant wealth tax on him.
If Starlink had become so central to military strategy that its Pentagon contracts could not be canceled, Reich said the service should be nationalized. After Reich raised nationalization on his podcast “last Saturday,” Musk posted: “Stealing companies is a serious crime. Prison for Reich.”
The column also promoted a free newsletter titled “How We Win,” offered weekly for 12 weeks. It named Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich, Stacey Abrams, Mehdi Hasan and Paul Krugman among its contributors and said the newsletter would address how to defeat Trumpism and build a better future. The author bio said Reich’s newsletter was at robertreich.substack.com and that his new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, was out in the United States and United Kingdom.