'He's doing it for power': Daily Beast exec buried on CNN for defense of 'genius' Musk

Daily Beast executive Joanna Coles ran into a buzzsaw on Saturday morning when both conservative and liberal CNN panelists pounced on her for saying Donald Trump should put "genius" Elon Musk to work solving America's homelessness crisis.

During a discussion on CNN's "Table for Five," Musk's deep involvement in the Trump's administration, including his alarming take-over of various critical U.S. government offices that included locking government workers out of computer systems and accessing sensitive private data, was a topic and Coles, the chief content officer at the Daily Beast, rushed to his defense.

It did not go well.

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Technology journalist Kara Swisher explained to the panel, "You can control who gets paid too. It's not just the privacy. It's that if he [Musk] could decide California shouldn't get paid or are if we are going to make cuts here what are they going to do about it? Deny government could hold back federal funds?"

"The question is: what is Elon doing here?" the Beast's Coles remarked. "Why does he want to be involved in this? I think the the sort of merging of tech and government is actually very exciting. I think it's exciting having Elon involved, but just not doing this."

"Elon should be given enormous real structural problems like homelessness," she proposed.

"Apply your enormous brain and brilliant creativity, and I love your description of the genius bar," she said to a stone-faced Swisher. "To something like homelessness, where he might be able to make a difference. We don't need him fiddling around in the minutiae of ––."

"He's doing it for power, Joanna," Swisher protested. "He's doing it for government power it's beyond contracts."

"Well, sort of the same thing," Coles attempted. "But actually it is incredible to finally bring tech into the White House."

"But not like this," Swisher shot back.

Host Phillip then jumped into the fray, stating, "I don't think it's about fixing the payment system, okay? I think it's about them wanting to be able to say, 'You get paid and you don't get paid, you get paid and you don't get paid.' The problem is there is a government in this country that decides who gets paid and who doesn't."

Columnist Solomon Jones interjected, "You want you want to be in charge of the data, that's what that is, that's what his business is at Twitter. When you don't pay anything for something, you're the product, so when we use Twitter, we're the product, right? And so imagine being in charge of the data of everybody who gets paid –– no –– imagine being rich enough that you can get the guy who's really running the Treasury Department out because you want the data, and he doesn't want you to have it. I mean, he's that rich and that powerful, and nobody elected him and I think that's the scary part."

Conservative Melik Abul also piled on, telling the panel, "And I wrote in the Washington Examiner, the problem with Elon Musk is that he's an unelected billionaire bureaucrat, and he's not responsible for anything that an elected official is responsible for."

"What's interesting here about this is the way that [Donald] Trump is running it like a TV show and actually we have a bit more transparency ––we know that Elon is doing this," Coles protested.

That led to protests from the entire panel with Jones lecturing Coles, "He [Musk] should apply his genius to homelessness. Well, you have to care about homelessness to want to solve it."

You can watch below or at the link.

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