Musk-Targeted Judge Uses Scrabble Tiles to Reassign Two Cases

A Delaware judge accused of bias by attorneys for Elon Musk and Tesla Inc. used a board game Thursday to force the firms to randomly select two new judges to preside over cases concerning lingering allegations of corporate wrongdoing before the electric vehicle-maker moved to Texas.

The chief judge of the Delaware Chancery Court made attorneys blindly choose Scrabble tiles from a bag held by one of her law clerks, with each tile corresponding to the name of one of her six colleagues on the prestigious business court’s bench.

Lawyers for Tesla and its CEO, the world’s richest person, had claimed Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick showed bias toward him on a social media platform after ruling against him in high-profile lawsuits.

“Do you view this as funny?” McCormick said to one of Tesla’s attorneys, Rudolf Koch of Richards, Layton & Finger PA, whose reaction to her explanation of the process caught her attention. He replied, “No.”

McCormick denied clicking “support” for a LinkedIn post celebrating Musk’s defeat in a California civil trial where a jury found he defrauded Twitter Inc. shareholders before acquiring the platform in 2022. However, she agreed to reassign the remaining Chancery Court cases involving Musk to other Chancery Court judges.

She decided to use Scrabble tiles “to eliminate an allegation of bias in the reassignment process,” she said, during a unique and tense hearing in Wilmington.

Scrabble Tiles

Koch pulled out a tile with the letter D, which means Vice Chancellor Bonnie W. David will oversee combined claims of insider trading over the sale of $7 billion in Tesla shares; allegations that Musk pulled resources from the electric vehicle maker in order to buy Twitter, which he rebranded as X; and claims that Musk improperly diverted artificial intelligence talent and hardware from Tesla to his xAI startup.

Attorneys for Musk and Tesla have argued those claims should’ve been filed in Texas, where the electric car-maker reincorporated after McCormick twice rejected a $56 billion CEO pay package for Musk. McCormick’s ruling on those arguments was still pending when Musk’s attorneys sought to have the litigation reassigned.

Another Tesla attorney, John Reed of DLA Piper LLP (US), pulled the letter C from the bag, meaning Vice Chancellor Nathan A. Cook will oversee issues regarding fees for shareholder attorneys who reached a settlement in a challenge over four years of compensation for Tesla’s directors. The Delaware Supreme Court in January cut the fees awarded by the Chancery Court.

One of Musk’s attorneys, Michael Barlow of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, inspected the bag and confirmed it held six tiles before Cook’s and David’s names were chosen. McCormick required all the defense attorneys who joined the demand for her recusal to attend the hearing.

A third case that had been up for reassignment—an investor’s lawsuit alleging Musk’s drug use threatened Tesla’s business—was voluntarily withdrawn the same day McCormick said she would reassign the remaining lawsuits.

Court Changes

McCormick is one of the top judges in Delaware, and she’s the first woman to lead the Chancery Court. The court’s seven judges are considered business law experts and decide M&A disputes without juries.

It’s a court of equity, requiring consideration of what’s fair beyond the question of monetary damages. An opinion from the court can require a company to implement governance changes, for example. McCormick, like the other Chancery Court judges, also handles some local property disputes, such as one involving the remains of a dead horse.

Musk’s CEO payout was reinstated by the Delaware Supreme Court in a December 2025 opinion that acknowledged the “great personal sacrifice” McCormick had endured as a target for Musk and his supporters. This year, Musk testified in the Twitter case that his lawyers advised him McCormick was “biased” against him, and he was likely to lose a 2022 court fight before her over his refusal to complete his acquisition of the platform.

Musk’s public attacks on McCormick throughout the pay package litigation prompted the state bar association to defend the state’s judiciary from “a disturbing trend” of “increasingly polarized rhetoric.” Still, some of the state’s most prominent defense attorneys supported a legislative overhaul of Delaware’s corporate statutes that critics partly attributed to Musk’s complaints about the Chancery Court.

The court recently implemented a new electronic filing system to rotate cases among its judges.

Previously, corporate defendants often saw the same judge repeatedly if a new case shared the “same factual predicate or transaction” as prior litigation. The intent was to promote efficiency while addressing the court’s burgeoning caseload, which has prompted an expansion of its magistrate bench and chambers within the Wilmington courthouse where it hears most disputes.

But complaints from companies that felt like some court decisions were “a foregone conclusion” because of the judge repeatedly assigned to their litigation reached Gov. Matt Meyer (D), who championed the corporate law changes recently upheld by the Delaware Supreme Court.

The cases are In re Tesla, Inc. Derivative Litig., Del. Ch., No. 2024-0631, hearing 4/2/26 and The Police and Fire Ret. Sys. of the City of Detroit v. Musk, Del. Ch., No. 2020-0477, hearing 4/2/26.