Was Elon Musk right to fire an X/Twitter employee over an X post protesting return-to-office?

“The complaint is dead on arrival in our view,” and “a no-brainer,” the social media company’s attorney David Broderdorf said Tuesday in opening arguments at a National Labor Relations Board hearing in San Francisco. 

The hearing is about the agency’s first-ever complaint against the company, alleging that its firing of employee Yao Yue violated the federal law prohibiting retaliation for workplace protests. The dispute stems from an episode in November 2022, when Musk had just bought the company, then called Twitter, and ordered workers back to the office. 

According to the complaint issued by the NLRB general counsel’s office, Yue read about Musk telling staff, “If you can physically make it to an office and you don’t show up, resignation accepted.” Yue responded by using the company’s own platform to post a tweet telling fellow workers, “Don’t resign, let him fire you,” and sent a similar message to an internal channel. The company terminated Yue a few days later, in order to punish her and to discourage other workers from taking collective action, according to the complaint.

X didn’t respond to requests for comment about the case. At the hearing, X’s lawyer told the agency judge that Yue was excluded from the law’s protection, because she was legally a supervisor rather than a mere employee, and that regardless, her comments were legally unprotected because they constituted a call for insubordination rather than just a protest against company policy. 

“When they say don’t comply, be fired, or don’t follow this rule, let’s all get fired, that’s insubordination,” Broderdorf said. “Employees have significant rights to complain and to protest and to challenge, as long as they’re not…