By Daniel Wiessner

(Reuters) – A federal judge in California on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit accusing social media platform X of pushing out workers with disabilities after Elon Musk took over the company and banned his employees from working from home.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in San Francisco said the plaintiff in the class action lawsuit scheduled for 2022, Dmitry Borodaenko, had failed to show how Musk’s order to return to the office specifically affected employees with disabilities. The judge gave him four weeks to file an amended complaint with more detailed demands.

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

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

Martinez-Olguin said on Wednesday that the ban on teleworking does not constitute discrimination on the basis of disability.

“Borodaenko’s theory is falsely based on the assumption that all employees with disabilities necessarily require 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 several requests for comment with emails saying “busy at the moment, please check back later.”

The lawsuit is one of several filed by former employees in the months following Musk’s $44 billion takeover of the company and subsequent layoff of about 75 percent of the workforce.

In other cases, Twitter has been accused of failing to inform employees and contractors about layoffs in a timely manner, failing to pay billions in promised severance pay, and convincing a disproportionate number of women and older workers to lay off their employees. X has denied any wrongdoing.

Some of these lawsuits were dismissed, and the plaintiffs appealed.

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