X, formerly known as Twitter, must go to court, a federal judge ruled after Elon Musk's company allegedly withheld bonuses from employees.
The federal judge said the plaintiff, Mark Schobinger, has a plausible case, allowing it to go forward in federal court in California and not Texas as X attempted to argue.
Schobinger was a senior director for X until May.
The allegations, the key argument to the case, stem from alleged promises that were made to employees who stayed with the company through Musks’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022.
The judge ruled the plaintiff has a plausible breach of contract case under California law.
Schobinger alleges Twitter verbally promised to pay each employee a portion of the bonuses in Twitter’s 2022 performance bonus plan, so long as the employee was covered by the plan and stayed with the company in the first quarter of 2023.
Schobinger claims he was covered as a senior director at the company until May of this year. He says he did what Twitter asked but never received his bonus.
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The judge ruled that by allegedly refusing to pay Schobinger his promised bonus, Twitter violated that contract.
Schobinger’s lawyer said, "This is a very important decision…which is relevant to claims we have filed on behalf of nearly two thousand Twitter employees."
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X no longer has a media relations department and could not be reached for comment on the judge's ruling.
