How one former Twitter employee could beat Elon Musk in court

In her first interview, former engineer Yao Yue discusses being fired over a tweet — and her success in getting the NLRB to file its first formal complaint against X

Oct 17, 2023

"Photo of a scholarly setting with a vibrant blue bird confidently standing atop a stack of leather-bound legal textbooks. The books have gold embossed titles related to various legal topics. The background is a wooden desk with a vintage lamp illuminating the scene." / DALL-E 3

On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board issued its first complaint against Elon Musk’s X Corp. The board accused X of illegally firing Yao Yue, a widely respected principal engineer at the company, for pushing back on Musk’s return-to-office policy, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by Platformer.

Specifically, it accused X of violating a federal law that prevents employers from retaliating against workers for discussing their working conditions and organizing with colleagues.

In her first interview about the case, Yue told Platformer that she hoped the case would draw attention to the mistreatment of workers at the former Twitter — and discourage Musk from impulsively firing other employees in the future.

“People often choose to accept illegal actions taken by people with more resources and better legal representation because they have no choice,” Yue told me. “When I did have a choice, I wanted to hold him accountable for myself and for people in similar situations.”

The complaint represents one of the first legal wins to date for former Tweeps, who have collectively filed 2,000 arbitration claims against the company since Musk took it over nearly a year ago. While Yue’s case won’t go to trial until January, the complaint suggests that Musk at times acted illegally during his purge of three-quarters of Twitter’s workforce in the months after buying the company.

Yue joined Twitter in 2010 as employee number 300. One of her first jobs was building out Twitter’s distributed caching system, which helped serve tweets efficiently from Twitter’s data centers. Seven years later, after returning to Twitter from maternity leave, she was itching to take on a new challenge. She decided to create a new function called performance engineering. Over the next five years, she later wrote, the division undertook projects that saved the company more than $100 million. (“And we had fun,” she added.)

The beginning of the end for Yue came two weeks after Musk acquired Twitter. In one of his first addresses to the employee base, Musk declared the end of Twitter’s commitment to remote work, as Platformer reported at the time.

“Let me be crystal clear,” he said. “If people do not return to the office when they are able to return to the office, they cannot remain at the company. End of story… Basically, if you can show up in an office and you do not show up at the office, resignation accepted. End of story.”

The mandate had no immediate practical effect on Yue, who went into the office almost every day. But it didn’t sit right with her that people who’d moved away from the Bay Area on the promise that they could keep their jobs were expected to suddenly uproot their entire lives, and their families’ lives, and return.

Musk’s return-to-office mandate sparked disbelief and outrage in the company’s still vibrant Slack channels. In the #social-watercooler channel, messages from employees alternated between shock and gallows humor.

The messages, which have not previously been reported, included:

This meeting would be a top post on r/cringe
Sets platform on fire hhOw dO wE mAkE thE pRodUct bEtTeR
Given that everything is on fire, what are you going to do to keep everyone who;s left to stay in the burning building and help put it out instead of exiting orderly via the fire exit?
He’s trying for a second appearance on SNL with that joke
How is this real?
HOW ARE WE GOING TO COMPLY WITH THE FTC?
At least Big Brother had a plan
Can’t scam a site that is down
Or when we lose all existing revenue when all the advertisers leave
This can’t be real
I have just exclaimed “WHAT THE FUCK” so loudly that my cat has woken up. And she’s basically deaf.
Remember when we had moderators?
He still doesn’t know that our teams are distributed
He has no plan
BE HARDCORE
Just be hardcore
BE IN OFFICE, BE HARDCORE
Being hardcore in the office will TOTALLY offset attrition
RIP
Twitter was a good website

To this litany of messages, Yue added one: “Don’t resign, be fired. Seriously.” She posted a similar message publicly on Twitter.

“I actually worked from the office — it wasn’t about that,” Yue told me. “It was for my colleagues. I was acting in the spirit of the old company values, doing what I thought was right.”

At the time, one of Twitter’s core company values was “communicate fearlessly to build trust.” And while Musk styles himself as a fearless communicator, he does not share his predecessor’s belief that the company would run better if employees were free to speak their minds. In the days that followed, Musk went on to ruthlessly fire those who had criticized him — or whom he simply suspected of disloyalty.

Yue was in bed around 5 AM last November 15 when she learned she no longer had a job. “After 12 amazing years and 3 weeks of chaos, I’m officially fired by Twitter,” she tweeted. “Never expected I would have stayed this long, and never expected I would be this relieved to be gone. I have a lot of stories to tell. But to my fellow (ex-)tweeps- #LoveWhereYouWorked 🫡”

Yue filed a charge with the NLRB against the company in March. Musk’s decisions regarding the November 4 layoffs, the end of remote work, and her own firing had crossed a line, she said.

“None of the firings or layoffs right after the merger were done properly, and one could argue much of that was illegal in terms of severance and cause,” she explains.

In the complaint, a regional director of the NLRB wrote that Yue had “engaged in concerted activities with other employees for the purposes of mutual aid and protection.”

Yue said she had been willing to settle if X would pay her an amount roughly equal to the wages she’d lost since mid-November. When X refused to negotiate, Yue decided to take further action. Her hearing is scheduled for January 30.

There is a deep (and already much-remarked-upon) irony in the fact that Yue and other employees were fired for criticizing Musk on Twitter when just months later he would promise to cover the legal costs of anyone “unfairly treated” by their employer for “posting or liking something on this platform.”

That protection does not, it seems, extend to anyone who works for Musk. (It’s also not clear that Musk has actually covered the legal fees of anyone fired for tweeting.)

In the meantime, though, Yue isn’t the only former employee to have gotten traction in her legal case against X. Last month, the company finally entered settlement talks with the thousands of ex-Tweeps seeking back pay and bonuses related to their departures.

“After 10 months of pressing them in every direction we have succeeded in getting Twitter to the table,” wrote Shannon Liss-Riordan, who represents many of the former workers, according to a memo obtained by Bloomberg. “Twitter wants to mediate with us in a global attempt to settle all claims we have filed.”

If Yue wins her case, she could receive back pay for the months since she lost her job. The NLRB could also force X to offer Yue her job back.

Yue says she has no intention of returning, though. She recently launched a startup with other former Twitter employees that helps companies measure and improve their engineering systems.

Yue’s real goal is to make it clear that employment laws apply to everyone, Elon Musk included.

“Obviously I'm not going to take the job back,” she says. “What matters to me is that the NLRB thinks I have a case. There are people who will say ‘it’s at-will employment, the company can do whatever it wants. But it can’t.”

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