Delaware Judge Gets Caught Cheering Elon Musk’s Defeat in Court

You may remember Judge Kathaleen McCormick of Delaware. She’s the judge who overturned Elon Musk’s multi-billion dollar pay package at Tesla back in January 2024.

A shareholder who only held 9 shares of stock sued Musk claiming that Musk retained undue influence over the board. Judge McCormick got the case because Tesla was incorporated in Delaware and determined that his pay package had to be overturned.

Musk responded by announcing a new shareholder vote would be held on the same pay package and a few months later that vote passed. 

As a practical matter, the vote showed that the original pay package was not the result of undue influence on the board as the plaintiff in the case had claimed. But as a legal matter, Judge McCormick decided a few months later that the new vote didn’t matter. The factual record in the case was already closed.

Whether to permit a party to assert a late-raised defense is a matter of judicial discretion where the court must take into account the potential for prejudice to the opposing party. This court has allowed a party to raise an affirmative defense based on a stockholder vote that occurred during litigation. But no court has ever allowed a party to deploy stockholder ratification as a defense after the close of fact finding…

Defendants raised the Stockholder Vote defense six years after this action was filed, one and a half years after trial, and five months after the Post-Trial Opinion.  Wherever the outer boundary of non-prejudicial delay lies, Defendants crossed it.  The court declines to exercise its discretion to permit Defendants to raise the defense of stockholder ratification at this late stage.

So she’s literally claiming to protect shareholders even as 75% of shareholders are telling her they want Musk to get the money. At the time, Musk replied to a post about Delaware judges and lawyers connections to Joe Biden with two words: “Absolute corruption.”

Absolute corruption

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 2, 2024

That was more than 15 months ago. Today, Musk’s attorneys are demanding Judge McCormick step aside from overseeing any further cases involving Tesla or Musk after McCormick liked a social media post mocking a recent loss Musk suffered in court.

Lawyers for Elon Musk and Tesla have asked a Delaware judge to step back from cases involving the billionaire entrepreneur, after her account “liked” a LinkedIn post celebrating his recent legal defeat in California…

The LinkedIn post that McCormick’s account reacted to related to a federal case in California, in which a jury last week found Musk had defrauded Twitter investors. Musk may be on the hook for billions in damages, if the jury verdict survives appeals.

A jury consultant in the federal case, who had worked for the shareholders, congratulated the plaintiff’s law firm on the social media platform and wrote: “Sorry, Elon. Sorry, Quinn Emanuel. Thanks $2 billion for your help in this trial. It was a pleasure working against you.”

Linked In apparently has a standard like button but it also has another method of signaling agreement with posts called “support” which has a distinct icon you have to press to signal your support. 

As alleged in the filing, LinkedIn’s “Support” reaction — shown as a heart cradled in an outstretched hand — requires a deliberate selection from multiple options and is generally interpreted as a stronger endorsement than a standard “Like,” which is the platform’s default, one-click response.

A separate LinkedIn post criticizing Musk also drew engagement from the judge’s chambers, with a staff account “liking” a message saying “so many people who should be so deeply ashamed of themselves seem incapable of being so,” according to the filing.

In the filing, Musk’s lawyers argue the LinkedIn activity strikes at the core of judicial impartiality, writing that the posts “are not simply negative criticism” but “inflammatory,” mocking Musk and his attorneys while celebrating a multibillion-dollar verdict against them…

Andrew Stoltmann, a Chicago-based attorney and adjunct professor at Northwestern University, said the alleged conduct cuts to the core of judicial neutrality.

“This judge violated that basic tenet of due process. The judge should absolutely be off this case.”

McCormick selected the support option so the phrase “Katie McCormick supports this” was floating above the mocking post about Musk. McCormick now claims she must have hit the button accidentally but suggests she didn’t even do that.

“I either did not click the ‘support’ icon at all, or I did so accidentally. I do not believe that I did it accidentally,” she added, in a letter to attorneys.

She needs to be removed from any case involving Tesla or Musk. No one could possibly believe she’s a neutral arbiter at this point.

Justice isn’t impartial.

A Delaware judge who previously ruled against @elonmusk and still oversees all of his Delaware cases was caught openly celebrating the trial attorneys against him in another case.

Kate McCormick should be disbarred & thrown off the bench.

Also, why is… https://t.co/4WOGQ7jw1d pic.twitter.com/ACJkMJxva4

— Katie Miller (@KatieMiller) March 25, 2026

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