Winners & losers: Be careful what you write or like on the internet – you never know when it might come back to haunt you. Lawyers for Elon Musk are trying to prove that this warning should be heeded in a lawsuit against the Tesla CEO. They say a Delaware judge should step aside because she liked a LinkedIn post mocking a $2 billion verdict against him in a separate California case, thereby showing bias.
Musk and Tesla filed the recusal motion this week in Delaware's Court of Chancery, arguing that Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick "supported" a LinkedIn post criticizing Musk and Quinn Emanuel, the law firm representing him. The filing says that this wasn't the default thumbs-up reaction but LinkedIn's heart-in-hand "Support" emoji, which the lawyers pointed out require a deliberate extra step to select.
The post at the center of the dispute came after a federal jury in San Francisco found Musk liable in a shareholder lawsuit over his 2022 Twitter takeover saga. Jurors said he was responsible for trying to drive down Twitter's stock price with posts about bots and fake accounts so he could renegotiate or escape the $44 billion deal. Damages haven't been set, but plaintiffs' counsel said they could reach about $2.5 billion.
If one LinkedIn reaction wasn't enough, the filing says there was another. Musk's legal team also flagged a separate anti-Musk post that received a like from an account linked to the judge's chambers, including a message saying "so many people who should be so deeply ashamed of themselves seem incapable of being so."
McCormick says the whole thing is either a mistake or something stranger. In her own filing, the judge said she either never clicked the reaction or did so accidentally, adding that she reported suspicious activity to LinkedIn. She has put two shareholder cases involving Musk on pause while she considers the recusal request.
One of those cases involves claims that Musk illegally profited by allegedly misleading investors about Tesla stock sales ahead of the Twitter purchase. The other is a separate Tesla derivative matter, and the pause also extends to a dispute over legal fees.
Musk and the judge have a history. McCormick previously oversaw Twitter's lawsuit to force Musk to close the acquisition after he tried to back out, and she also struck down his massive Tesla compensation package before Delaware's Supreme Court reversed that decision in December 2025. During the California trial, Musk testified that he believed McCormick was biased against him.