Musk Cases in Delaware to Be Reassigned After Bias Alleged (1)

A top judge in Delaware said she will no longer preside over multiple lawsuits involving Elon Musk and his companies after the billionaire’s lawyers alleged she had shown bias after ruling against him in high-profile cases.

Delaware Chancery Court Chief Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick said in a letter Monday that she will reassign multiple Musk-related cases to other judges. Musk’s attorneys wrote to the court last week alleging that she signaled her support for a LinkedIn post celebrating Musk’s defeat in a California civil fraud trial, in which a jury found the billionaire defrauded Twitter Inc. shareholders before acquiring the platform in 2022.

McCormick denied supporting the post and said she is not biased against Musk. But she agreed to distribute her cases involving Musk to other vice chancellors in Delaware.

“The motion for recusal rests on a false premise — that I support a LinkedIn post about Mr. Musk, which I do not in fact support,” McCormick wrote in the letter to Musk’s lawyers. “I am not biased against the defendants in these actions.”

McCormick has been overseeing multiple suits against Musk, including one that claims he sold more than $7 billion in Tesla Inc. shares after obtaining insider information. Another case accuses Musk of diverting resources from the car company in his move to buy Twitter, now known as X. And a third suit alleges that he improperly steered artificial intelligence talent and hardware from Tesla to his xAI startup, maker of the Grok chatbot.

In her letter, McCormick noted that she had dismissed a suit against Musk last year as evidence that she wasn’t biased against him. But she said she would reassign the cases because “disproportionate media attention surrounding a judge’s handling of an action is detrimental to the administration of justice” and that “the Court of Chancery is far greater than any one person.”

McCormick wrote in a letter last week 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.

Musk has previously taken aim at McCormick on X after she twice in 2024 voided his Tesla pay package — which was the biggest executive compensation plan in US history when the electric-vehicle maker’s board awarded it to him 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.

Musk testified in the Twitter case in San Francisco earlier this month that 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. He said that was the only reason he agreed to pay the $44 billion he had originally offered for the company.

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.

Musk also recently took aim at the judge who oversaw the Twitter case in San Francisco, reposting a comment from another X account about Senior US District Judge Charles Breyer that included a smiling photo of the 84-year-old judge wearing his trademark red bowtie. Musk said the “probability of me getting a fair trial if this is how the judge dresses is 0.0%.”

When asked if Breyer had a comment, a spokesperson for the Northern District of California said judges don’t comment on individual cases.

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

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

Steve Stroth, Elizabeth Wasserman

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