NPR reports that the conservative Texas judge overseeing billionaire Elon Musk's lawsuit against Media Matters has been playing the stock market with Tesla shares.
U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, who's been dishing out rulings left and right in Musk's favor, was trading Tesla stock in 2023 — the very same year Musk filed his lawsuit. The judge's financial disclosure form shows he "bought Tesla stock in January, sold some in June, and bought again in September."
The fact that Musk filed the lawsuits O'Connor's division even though neither Twitter nor Media Matters is located in Texas seems like a textbook case of judge shopping. I guess when you are the richest billionaire in the world, you can pick any court you like to carry out your vendetta.
Richard Painter, an ethics expert at the University of Minnesota Law School, suggested that "the Tesla stock price could be substantially affected by the outcome of this case."
O'Connor has made several rulings in favor of Musk, including rejecting Media Matters' attempt to dismiss the complaint. The judge ruled that Musk's lawyers had sufficiently argued that the group had acted with "actual malice."
Despite calls for recusal, Judge O'Connor is refusing to step down from the case. He's even dismissed Media Matters' calls to come clean about financial interests, labelling it a "backdoor recusal" attempt.
From NPR:
O'Connor's involvement in the Musk cases has led to criticism over alleged "judge shopping," or the practice of filing a suit in a district in which a litigant hopes for a favorable outcome.
"It's particularly extreme," Jennifer Ahearn, senior counsel for the Brennan Center's Judiciary Program, told NPR in August about judge shopping in northern Texas. "It has become a problem for the judiciary in a way that it hasn't been in the past."
In remarks O'Connor delivered recently at a Fort Worth, Texas, conference for the conservative group the Federalist Society, O'Connor nodded to the controversy.
"I am confident you will find that Fort Worth is a very welcoming city. And, no, I don't mean for judge shopping, as some like to think," O'Connor told conference attendees.
If Trump wins, you can bet he'll put O'Connor in his Supreme Court.
Previously:
• Musk boosts 4chan claim that women are incapable of critical thinking
• 'They're such NPCs' — Why Elon Musk thinks you're not real
• Elon Musk triggered by Black comic book characters
• Elon Musk to his sycophant pet journalist Matt Taibbi: 'You are dead to me'
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