Elon Musk’s X defeats ex-employee’s disability bias lawsuit after telecommuting ban

A federal judge in California on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit accusing social media platform X of firing disabled workers 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 proposed 2022 lawsuit, Dmitry Borodaenko, failed to show how Musk’s return-to-office mandate specifically affected skilled workers. limited. The judge gave him four weeks to file an amended lawsuit, including more detailed allegations.

Borodaenko, a former engineering manager and cancer survivor, claims he was fired shortly after Musk bought X, then called 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 “high-intensity hours” or quit, and later tweeted that it was “morally wrong” to work from home.

Martinez-Olguin on Wednesday said the telecommuting ban does not constitute disability discrimination.

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

An attorney for Borodaenko did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

X responded to multiple requests for comment by email saying “busy right now, please check back later.”

The lawsuit is one of several filed by former employees in the months after Musk bought the company for $44 billion and laid off about 75% of its workforce.

Other cases accuse Twitter of failing to notify employees and contractors in advance of layoffs, failing to pay billions of dollars in promised severance payments and disproportionately targeting women and older workers for job cuts. X has denied wrongdoing.

Some of these cases have been dismissed, prompting appeals from pending plaintiffs.