The employees, suing in Federal court, since they have a clear and obvious loss to point to, they will have standing. Judges can either obey the law or not. If they don't obey the law, then we are much further along on the authoritarian spectrum then everyone thinks, but so far Musk has lost a lot of court cases and has several emergency injunctions against him doing anything.
Judges can write as many judgments as they want, but who's going to enforce those judgments? Only an executive branch that is interested in the rule of law is going to care about judgments.