CNN Host Confronts Democratic Senator on ‘A**hole’ Musk Tweet: ‘Is That the Best Way to Communicate?’

CNN’s Brianna Keilar confronted Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) over a tweet ripping “billionaire asshole bosses” like Elon Musk.

Last month, Musk – the “Department of Government Efficiency” head (but also not) – had emails sent to every federal employee asking them to list five things they accomplished at work. Originally, Musk announced that failure to respond would be “taken as a resignation.” The email ultimately did not contain that stipulation.

“I bet a lot of people have had an experience like this with a bad boss – there’s an email in your inbox on Saturday night saying, ‘Prove to me your worthiness by Monday or else,'” Smith tweeted at the time. “I’m on the side of the workers, not the billionaire asshole bosses.” In another tweet, she criticized “dick bosses” like Musk.

Smith, who is retiring at the end of her term in 2027, appeared on Wednesday’s CNN News Central, where Keilar quoted the senator’s tweets back to her and asked about the vulgarity.

“And you’ve seen the polls,” Keilar said. “Democratic voters want more from your party. They want to see you opposing Trump in a more fulsome way. So, I mean, I ask you this sincerely. Like, what’s the value in that kind of language and communication? Is that the best way to communicate the stakes of the moment that the country’s in?”

“Well, what I’m hearing from voters at home and what I heard on your show is that people want to see some fight,” Smith replied. “They want to see some urgency in this moment that we’re in. And I think with that tweet that I did, it touched a nerve with millions of people because everybody has had the experience of having some boss who treats them with disrespect, who denigrates their work and is just basically using big power-play moves to terrorize them. And so to me, what we really need to do in this moment is to speak out and to speak out loudly and clearly. And you can see my colleagues doing that across the board.”

Smith went on to note that Musk called Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) – a former astronaut and combat veteran – a “traitor” over his support of Ukraine.

Keilar responded by playing “devil’s advocate,” stating, “That wasn’t a four-letter word that he used, what Elon Musk said to him, and it got a lot of attention. I mean, isn’t there, isn’t there a way to mirror what your constituents, the outrage they’re feeling, maybe even in a bigger way than using like, the limited vocabulary of curse words? Because there’s a lot of great words out there that can communicate a lot.”

“I would just say that in that moment, that’s what I thought,” Smith answered. “And obviously it struck a nerve. And there are lots of different ways that we can express ourselves. And I know that my constituents, sometimes they swear, sometimes they don’t swear. What matters is that people feel like you’re actually expressing what you really think, that you’re not sugarcoating it, as my mother used to say – who also had a tendency to swear a fair amount.”

Watch above via CNN.