Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said Sunday that tech billionaire Elon Musk “does not have the power to fire people.”
“Elon Musk does not have the power to fire people. The president of the United States is Donald Trump, and the agency heads are the ones who manage each of their departments, so they’ve got the — they’ve got the decision, that’s what Elon Musk has told me time and time again,” Scott said on CNN’s “State of the Union” to anchor Jake Tapper.
The comments from Scott follow reported tension between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Musk amid a Cabinet meeting last week. According to The New York Times, Musk went after the secretary of State for not firing a large portion of the workforce at the State Department and said that he is only “good on TV.”
The Times reported that Rubio has been privately “furious” with the tech billionaire for a while, especially following the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) taking on an effort to close down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administers billions of dollars in humanitarian, security and development assistance in over 100 countries.
During the Cabinet meeting last week, Rubio pushed back. He said that Musk was not speaking the truth and asked if over 1,500 State Department workers who went into early retirement should be brought back so they could only be fired to count for layoffs, according to The Times.
“The president of the United States was elected, alright, by the American people to [basically] rein in government, rein in this waste … bring some accountability … some transparency, some common sense to government, and that’s exactly what Donald Trump is doing,” Scott said Sunday.
On Saturday, Trump said on his Truth Social platform, “ELON AND MARCO HAVE A GREAT RELATIONSHIP.”
“ANY STATEMENT OTHER THAN THAT IS FAKE NEWS!!! DJT,” he added.
