Judge Reed O'Connor owns Tesla stock. For nearly two years, Elon Musk's companies have been winning in his courtroom.
In November 2023, Musk's X Corp sued Media Matters for America, accusing the watchdog group of manipulating X's platform to place advertisers' content next to extremist posts. Neither company is based in Texas. X filed in Fort Worth anyway, arguing that Texas-headquartered advertisers named in Media Matters' report -- AT&T among them -- gave the Northern District standing to hear it. The case was assigned to Judge O'Connor.
The Old Goat has already mapped how the Justice Department routes politically sensitive cases to a handful of friendly, effectively single-judge divisions in Northern Texas. Musk's docket runs through the same machinery. The difference is what's riding on it: not policy, but a stock price -- one the judge himself holds.
O'Connor's federal financial disclosure -- the most recent public filing at the time -- showed between $15,001 and $50,000 invested in Tesla, Musk's other company. He also held stock in Unilever, a member of an advertising trade group Musk was suing in a related case in the same courthouse.
The Rulings Followed a Pattern
In August 2024, O'Connor denied Media Matters' motion to dismiss, clearing the case for what was then a scheduled trial the following spring. He had already granted X broad latitude to demand internal documents from the nonprofit -- before ever deciding whether the underlying case had merit. Coverage of the ruling described O'Connor finding that Musk's lawyers had adequately alleged Media Matters acted with actual malice, the standard that governs defamation-adjacent claims -- a finding favorable enough to survive dismissal outright.
The judge who owned the stock was the one who ruled the stock didn't count. That same month, ruling on a motion Media Matters had filed itself, O'Connor decided the question of his own conflict directly: he found nothing in the record showed Tesla had a direct financial interest in the outcome of Musk's suit against Media Matters, and declined to require X to name Tesla as an interested party.
Days later, on August 13, 2024, O'Connor recused himself -- without explanation -- from a second, related Musk lawsuit, this one against an advertising trade group whose members included Unilever by name. He did not recuse from the Media Matters case. Media Matters' own lawyers had argued that Musk treats his personal interests, Tesla's, and X's as functionally inseparable -- that the market values them as one and the same, and that a win for X is a win for the stock O'Connor held.
Two months later, updated disclosure filings showed O'Connor still had not sold the Tesla stock, even after formally accepting the Media Matters case for trial. Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor and former White House chief ethics lawyer, said publicly that the case's outcome could plausibly move Tesla's stock price -- the conflict wasn't hypothetical.
Even the Fifth Circuit Said Enough
Two months after that, a Fifth Circuit panel -- two of its three judges Republican-appointed -- blocked an O'Connor discovery order that would have forced Media Matters to hand over its donor list, finding X's demands disproportionate to the case. Even the country's most conservative appeals court found O'Connor had gone too far. By then, Media Matters had reportedly spent millions of dollars complying with the discovery demands its lawyers compared to harassment.
As of this July, O'Connor -- since elevated to chief judge of the district -- was still overseeing discovery disputes in the case, ordering X to turn over some internally deleted posts while declining to compel others. Filed in November 2023 for an April 2025 trial, the case still hasn't reached one.
Musk is not new to this Old Goat's ledger. Part 6 named him, alongside Kushner, Witkoff, Rubio, and the Trump sons, as one of the financially conflicted actors this project has tracked from the start. View Orbit Map → What's new is the judge.
O'Connor ruled that Tesla wasn't an interested party in the case. By any ordinary reading of the phrase, he was.