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

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

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

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

Musk said in a memo to company 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 said Wednesday that the telecommuting ban does not amount to disability discrimination.

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

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

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

The lawsuit is one of several filed by former employees in the months that followed Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the company and subsequent layoffs of about 75 percent of the workforce.

Other cases accuse Twitter of failing to give 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 he denied wrongdoing.

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

(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and David Gregorio)