[danaris]

To be clear, in the EU, the workers have been blocked from access, but they have not been fired, because he legally cannot fire them in that manner.

Before access was blocked, from what I've heard, many of the EU Twitter employees read the "you're fired" email, said "hah, not from that I'm not" and went right back into work the next day.

If Twitter employees were unionized here in the US, it would be a similar story: Musk could say "you're all fired", but unless he went through the processes outlined in the union contract to fire the people, they would not be fired. At most, if he could get the payroll employees to do his bidding, he could stop them from getting paid, but that would absolutely not hold up in court, and he would have to pay them with back pay once the legal system got done with it—and that kind of legal dispute probably wouldn't take 2 years, since it would be an extremely straightforward case of breach of contract.