A federal judge in Texas overseeing a high-profile lawsuit filed by billionaire Elon Musk against the watchdog group Media Matters was buying and selling stock in Musk’s Tesla company in 2023, the year Musk filed the suit, according to financial disclosure reports recently made public.
In August, NPR reported that U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas had made an investment in Tesla of between $15,001 and $50,000. O’Connor has delivered a string of decisions in the Media Matters lawsuit in favor of Musk, who argues the advocacy group disparaged X, his social media site.
While Tesla is not directly part of Musk’s Media Matters suit, legal ethics experts called on O’Connor to recuse himself from the case, since the outcome of a lawsuit involving one of Musk’s companies could, in turn, have an effect on the stock value of another part of his empire, including electric vehicle company Tesla, which represents the majority of his wealth.
According to that filing, O’Connor did not make any Tesla transactions that year after taking the case in November. He has not bought or sold Tesla stock in the first few months of 2024, according to the most recent publicly available financial disclosures.
Richard Painter, an ethics expert at the University of Minnesota Law School, pointed to federal laws that require recusal when a judge or family member can financially benefit from the outcome of a case.