Musk’s ban on remote work at X beats disability bias claim for now

A federal judge in California on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit accusing social media platform X of forcing out workers with disabilities after Elon Musk took over the company and barred employees from working remotely.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in San Francisco said the plaintiff in the 2022 proposed class action, Dmitry Borodaenko, failed to show how Musk’s mandate to return to the office specifically impacted employees with disabilities. The judge gave him four weeks to file an amended lawsuit including more detailed claims.

Borodaenko, a former engineering manager and cancer survivor, claims he was fired shortly after Musk acquired X, then called Twitter, for refusing to report to the office during the COVID-19 pandemic. The lawsuit claims X violated a federal law requiring employers to accommodate workers’ disabilities.

Musk said in a memo to the company’s staff in November 2022 that employees should be prepared to work “long hours at high intensity” or quit, and later tweeted that it was “morally wrong” to work from home.

Martinez-Olguin on Wednesday said the ban on remote work did not amount to disability discrimination.

“Borodaenko’s theory improperly relies on the assumption that all employees with disabilities necessarily required remote work as a reasonable accommodation,” Martinez-Olguin wrote.

A lawyer for Borodaenko did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

X responded to multiple requests for comment with emails stating “busy now, please check back later.”

The lawsuit is one of several that former employees filed in the months following Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the company and the ensuing layoffs of about 75% of its workforce.

Other cases accuse Twitter of not giving employees and contractors advance notice of layoffs, failing to pay billions of dollars in promised severance, and disproportionately targeting women and older workers for job cuts. X has denied wrongdoing.

Some of those cases have been dismissed, prompting appeals from the plaintiffs that are pending.