Musk Wins Appeal Over Tweet He Had to Delete About Union Push

A federal appeals court handed Elon Musk a victory in a freedom-of-speech case on Friday by overturning an earlier ruling in a dispute between the billionaire and the National Labor Relations Board.

In March last year, three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans affirmed the board’s finding that Tesla illegally fired an employee involved in union organizing, and that Mr. Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, had illegally threatened workers’ stock options in a post on Twitter if they chose to unionize. The opinion allowed the labor board to enforce its 2021 order requiring Tesla to reinstate, with back pay, the employee, Richard Ortiz, and Mr. Musk to delete the 2018 post.

Mr. Musk challenged the panel’s ruling, and on Friday the full court ruled, 9 to 8, that the labor board had improperly ordered him to delete the social media post. “The agency exceeded its authority,” the 11-page ruling said. “We hold that Musk’s tweets are constitutionally protected speech.”

“Deleting the speech of private citizens on topics of public concern is not a remedy traditionally countenanced by American law,” the ruling added.

The court sent the matter of Mr. Ortiz’s firing back to the labor board to review, saying the board had failed “to consider the fact that the actual decision maker in Ortiz’s firing harbored no anti-union animus.”

The judges did not rule on whether Mr. Musk’s online comment constituted a National Labor Relations Act violation for illegally threatening workers. (The board has held that it did.)