Elon Musk demands judge’s recusal after latest flare-up over alleged bias

Elon Musk demanded on Wednesday that a Delaware judge recuse herself from Tesla lawsuits, arguing she recently demonstrated her bias against him when she liked an anti-Musk LinkedIn post. 

Musk’s lawyers filed a motion for recusal in Delaware’s Court of Chancery, which included a screenshot of Judge Kathaleen McCormick liking the social media post celebrating Musk’s $2 billion court loss in a separate case. The attorneys noted that the incident did “not exist in a vacuum.”

The lawyers were referring to McCormick previously presiding over high-stakes cases involving Musk and the tech billionaire accusing the judge of bias stretching back years. The ongoing friction with the judge follows hostility Musk has faced from the left in recent years, most notably when he became a close ally of President Donald Trump in 2024 and through the early months of the administration. 

Musk’s lawyers said McCormick appeared to cheer on a lawyer on LinkedIn who made a post mocking Musk’s legal defeat in a California fraud case. McCormick is currently presiding over separate derivative litigation brought by Tesla shareholders who have alleged Musk harmed the company by overpaying himself and board members. The lawyers said one of McCormick’s staff members also liked another anti-Musk post related to Musk’s pending litigation.

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“This post to which the Court reacted and another to which a Court staff member reacted are not simply negative criticism of Mr. Musk and his attorneys, they are inflammatory,” Musk’s lawyers wrote.

The lawyers said that “the very facts underlying the litigation celebrated in the posts are squarely at issue in the consolidated and coordinated actions.”

McCormick later deactivated her LinkedIn account, and in a letter to attorneys in the case she denied supporting the anti-Musk post.

“I either did not click the ‘support’ icon at all, or I did so accidentally,” McCormick wrote. “I do not believe that I did it accidentally.”

McCormick in 2022 presided over a separate, high-profile lawsuit brought by Twitter, now called X, against Musk to force him to complete his $44 billion acquisition of the company after Musk attempted to back out over allegations the company misled him about the number of bots on the platform. Musk ended up moving forward with the acquisition and later testified that he felt forced to because he believed McCormick was biased against him.

“We were unlikely to win the [Twitter] case in Delaware because the judge was extremely biased against me,” Musk said this month, according to the recusal motion. “This was, in fact, the same judge that struck my Tesla option grant that was subsequently overturned by the Delaware Supreme Court. So it’s accurate to say she was, that judge was not favorably inclined to me. Not objective.”

In another lawsuit, McCormick in 2024 twice voided a multibillion-dollar pay package for Musk and the Tesla board, saying they had breached their fiduciary duties and that Musk effectively controlled the board. The Delaware Supreme Court reinstated the pay package but upheld McCormick’s underlying findings.

Musk responded that year to an X post from a conservative influencer about McCormick, writing “absolute corruption” after the influencer noted that she had previously worked at a Delaware law firm that donated to former President Joe Biden.

Musk’s grievances with McCormick began amid a national push against the tech billionaire as he began weighing in on politics, speaking out against the Democrat Party ahead of the 2022 midterms and endorsing Trump in the 2024 election. 

He became the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency in 2025, serving in the role as a special government employee as he sought to identify government overspending and fraud, which raised his status as a political target by the left. Democrat lawmakers condemned Musk’s DOGE efforts in protests, while Tesla locations were targeted by rioters last year as critics characterized Musk as an unelected billionaire working in the administration. 

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Trump and Musk had a public falling out last spring, when Musk openly opposed the president’s signature budget bill, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The pair have since been spotted chatting at various public events.