Musk Deepens Feud With Delaware Judge, Alleging Bias on LinkedIn

Elon Musk’s lawyers are urging the Delaware Chancery Court’s chief judge to step aside from lawsuits involving him and his companies, alleging she has shown bias against the billionaire after ruling against him in high-profile cases.

In a filing concerning Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick, Musk’s attorneys pointed to a LinkedIn screenshot that they said shows she “supports” a post on the network celebrating Musk’s defeat in a California civil fraud trial as “the little guy” prevailing over “the richest man in the world.”

McCormick, in a letter to lawyers, wrote that she does not support the post and while she may have hit the “support” button accidentally, she doesn’t think she did. The judge said she reported “suspicious activity” to LinkedIn and was locked out of her account when she tried to log in and check the status of that report. She said she prepared the letter prior to receiving the request that she recuse, which she said she will review.

Musk’s attorneys claimed in their filing that the activity on McCormick’s LinkedIn account shows her predisposition to rule against him in violation of Delaware’s Judicial Code of Conduct, which requires judges to refrain from showing bias or prejudice.

McCormick should recuse herself from the handful of Musk-related cases she is overseeing, the lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP said in the filing.

A spokesman for the judge said she declined to comment beyond the letter.

LinkedIn Post

Musk’s lawyers said in the filing that the LinkedIn post that McCormick endorsed was written by a jury consultant who worked with lawyers for the Twitter investors who prevailed in some of their claims against Musk in a trial this month in California. “It was a pleasure working against you,” the consultant wrote in the post that was included in the filing.

In the filing, Musk’s attorneys included a screenshot of the post saying that a heart hovering in an outstretched hand, referring to the support button, required “deliberate selection” and showed that the judge supported it.

Musk has openly complained before about McCormick, who in 2024 twice voided his Tesla Inc. pay package — which had set a record for executive compensation in the US when the electric-vehicle maker’s board approved the plan in 2018.

The judge reasoned in her January 2024 ruling that the company’s directors were too beholden to Musk. He posted the next month on X that McCormick “has done more damage to the state of Delaware than any judge in modern history.” When McCormick again struck down the pay plan that December, Musk posted “absolute corruption.”

The Delaware Supreme Court in December 2025 overruled McCormick and reinstated the pay plan.

Twitter Case

Musk again spoke out about McCormick when he took the stand this month in San Francisco federal court to defend himself in the Twitter investor case.

He testified that back in 2022, his lawyers advised him that he was destined to lose his Delaware court battle with Twitter’s board over his refusal to follow through with buying the platform because McCormick, who was handling the case, was “biased” against him.

Musk said that’s the only reason he agreed to pay the full price of $44 billion that he had originally offered for the company.

McCormick is still assigned some investor suits against Musk, including one that claims he sold more than $7 billion in Tesla shares after obtaining insider information; another that accused him of diverting resources from the car company in his move to buy Twitter; and a third alleging that he improperly steered artificial intelligence talent and hardware from Tesla to his xAI startup, maker of the Grok chatbot.

Those cases were ongoing or filed shortly before Musk began moving the legal homes of his companies, including SpaceX and Neuralink, out of Delaware.

Musk’s attacks on Delaware’s courts helped fuel an overhaul to the state’s corporate statutes, making it more difficult for smaller shareholders to challenge company founders and insiders. The Delaware Supreme Court in February upheld the constitutionality of the changes.

--With assistance from Michael Leonard.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Jef Feeley in Wilmington, Delaware at jfeeley@bloomberg.net;
Chris Dolmetsch in Federal Court in Manhattan at cdolmetsch@bloomberg.net;
Sabrina Willmer in Washington at swillmer2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net

Peter Blumberg, Ben Bain

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