'Oh stop!' GOP's Byron Donalds gets testy when CNN anchor corners him on union remarks
August 14, 2024
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) tried to spin away Donald Trump's cheerleading for Elon Musk firing striking workers, but CNN's Kate Bolduan wasn't having it.
The United Auto Workers union filed an unfair labor practice complaint against the Republican presidential nominee and the Tesla CEO after Trump praised Musk as "the greatest cutter" because he had fired or threatened to fire workers who went on strike, and Donalds insisted they were discussing the tech mogul's takeover of Twitter.
"I think what they were talking about during that conversation was about when it went Elon took over Twitter," Donalds said. Right now it's named X, obviously, but when he took over Twitter, yeah, Elon went in there and he cleaned house. But yes, look, Twitter was a mess at the time when he took it over. They had massive amount of people working at Twitter, but it wasn't actually generating income at the end of the day."
Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and renamed it the following July, and a financial disclosure filed by the mutual fund Fidelity, which owns a stake in the company, showed the social media platform had lost 71 percent of its value after the CEO cut at least half of the staff and reduced moderation, which drove about 15 percent of its monthly users away in the first year.
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"People need to remember in our country businesses whether they are large or small, they have to generate income. When they generate income, it gives you an ability to hire workers, pay workers, and exchange their labor for money," Donalds said. "That's how our economic system works. Not everybody is going to be able to just keep their job just because they worked at the company. It's an unfortunate reality."
Bolduan attempted to drive him back on topic, saying she was specifically asking about the circumstances of Musk firing striking workers, but the GOP lawmaker tried to steer the conversation to attacking Kamala Harris' economic record.
"I'm talking about what they were talking about in that conversation," he said, brushing past Bolduan's redirection. "They were talking about Twitter, X, that's what he was talking about. Was there even a conversation – oh, stop, see, now this is the problem because we're talking about a specific business. Do we want to talk about what Elon Musk did at X or do we want to talk about the economic policies facing America?"
It's not clear what employees Trump and Musk were talking about, but eight former workers at SpaceX sued the rocket company and Musk alleging they were fired for challenging a hostile work environment rife with sexual harassment, and an appeals court upheld a National Labor Relations Board finding that he had threatened Tesla employees in a Twitter post with a loss of stock options if they formed a union.
"We have, our show, confirmed the statement from [Teamsters president] Sean O'Brien reacting to that part of the conversation, saying firing workers for organizing, for striking and exercising the rights as Americans, is economic terrorism," Bolduan said. "That is what I was asking you about. I think it's an important statement coming from a very important union president."
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