Elon Musk violated US labor laws in 2018 when he tweeted that Tesla factory workers would forego stock options if they chose to join a union, according to a federal appeals court. On Friday, in a decision discovered by Business Insider, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a decision by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that found Musk had made unlawful threats related to employee compensation.
In May 2018, a Twitter user asked Musk about his stance on unions. “Nothing prevents the Tesla team at our car plant from voting for the union. Could do tmrw if they wanted to,” he said tweeted in response. “But why pay union dues and give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is double what it was when the facility was UAW and everyone is already receiving medical care.”
The Tesla factory has literally miles of yellow lines and duct tape. Forklift not beeping report is also bs. These are both demonstrably false, but have been reported as “facts” by Reveal.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 21, 2018
The tweet immediately caught the attention of union activists, and in 2021, in response to a complaint from the United Auto Workers union, the NLRB found that Musk had threatened employees. Tesla has argued that the tweet was Musk’s way of suggesting that workers at other automakers don’t get stock options. NLRB Chairwoman Wilma Liebmann saw things differently. “The employee will hear it like this: ‘If I vote for the union, stock options will no longer be an option,'” she told Bloomberg in 2018.
After reviewing the decision, the Fifth Circuit Court sided with the NLRB. “Because stock options are part of Tesla employees’ compensation and nothing in the tweet indicates that Tesla would be forced to terminate stock options or that the UAW would be the reason for the termination of stock options, substantial evidence supports the NLRB’s conclusion, that the tweet is an implied threat to end stock options in retaliation for unionization,” the panel wrote.
The court ordered Musk to delete the tweet. At the time of writing this article, the embassy is still live. The Fifth Circuit Court also upheld an NLRB order that Tesla reinstate Richard Ortiz, a worker the automaker fired for organizing workers at its Fremont, California plant.