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Elon Musk has a fan where he least needs one at the moment. The judge overseeing a case between the billionaire’s X social media platform and a group of adversarial advertisers has begged off of it.
“I hearby recuse myself from the above numbered case,” Judge Reed O’Connor wrote in a court filing Tuesday. “Please see that it is assigned to another judge per the usual procedure.”
NPR noted last week that O’Connor, who has repeatedly ruled in Musk’s favor during a lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers, owns at least $15,000 and as much as $50,000 in Tesla (TSLA) stock. Musk’s X is suing the WFA on antitrust grounds because it believes its since-shuttered brand safety arm, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, had suggested that major companies stop advertising on X because it had changed its content moderation policies before a documented rise in hate speech on the platform.
Musk responded by telling them to “go f**k themselves,” a comment he later tried to walk back. The WFA disbanded GARM last week, though it says that it believes its court case will “demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules in all our activities.”
