Court temporarily drops lawsuit against X alleging Elon Musk forced out disabled employees by banning work-from-home

After Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter, now rebranded as X, the social media giant has faced significant upheaval, including mass layoffs and a shift away from remote work. These changes have led to a flurry of lawsuits from former employees. In one such case, a federal judge in California, US recently dismissed a lawsuit alleging that X discriminated against disabled workers by ending remote work. The lawsuit, filed by Dmitry Borodaenko, a former engineering manager and cancer survivor, claimed he was unfairly fired for refusing to return to the office during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin ruled that Borodaenko did not provide sufficient evidence to show how the company’s return-to-office mandate specifically harmed disabled employees. However, she allowed him four weeks to amend and resubmit the lawsuit with more detailed claims, according to a report by Reuters.

Borodaenko’s lawsuit argued that X violated federal laws requiring employers to accommodate workers with disabilities. Musk, however, had made it clear in a November 2022 memo that employees should be ready to work "long hours at high intensity" or leave the company, later tweeting that remote work was "morally wrong."

The judge determined that banning remote work didn’t amount to discrimination against disabled employees, pointing out that Borodaenko’s argument wrongly assumed all disabled workers needed remote work as an accommodation.

This lawsuit is just one among several that former employees have filed in the wake of Musk’s acquisition and subsequent layoffs, with other cases accusing the company of improper notice before layoffs, failure to pay severance, and unfairly targeting women and older workers. X has denied any wrongdoing.