We Regret to Inform You That Elon Musk Is Doing Objectionable Court-Related Stuff Now
As if you needed any more reasons not to tweet.
The American legal system already features too many deeply objectionable and alarmingly damp white guys who do awful things with their power and influence. So it is with great sorrow that I must inform you that Elon Musk, the most mendacious dolt Silicon Valley has to offer, managed to cross into the legal news space this week. Anywhere there is a whiff of culture war in the air, Musk is sure to pick up the scent and follow along, pausing every few steps to look down at his phone as he fires off some weirdo conspiracy theory tweet.
Effective next month, the terms of service on X, the social media site Musk bought and ruined, will steer the site’s future disputes with its rapidly-dwindling user base to the Northern District of Texas, one of the most conservative federal courts in the country. The Northern District is home to Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee most famous for attempting to invalidate the entire Affordable Care Act by himself. More recently, O’Connor has handed Musk a series of litigation victories in his lawsuit against Media Matters For America, which once had the temerity to report that X sometimes displays pro-Nazi content alongside ads from Apple, Bravo, and IBM.
As Chris Geidner at Law Dork has covered extensively, complicating matters here is the fact that O’Connor is something of an amateur day trader who owns stock in Tesla, Musk’s electric car company that sucked to begin with. In a functioning legal system, this conflict of interest would require O’Connor to recuse himself from Musk-related matters. Yet despite recusing himself in a different ongoing lawsuit that Musk filed against other X advertisers who fled his cesspool of crypto scammers, O’Connor has declined to recuse himself in this one. When you are a federal judge with money tied up in the financial success of a guy in your courtroom, it is a prudent business decision to retain some degree of control over the proceedings, I guess.
X’s terms of service are a form of clickwrap, which refers to the pop-up box you have to dutifully scroll through before using anything on the internet. Burying obscure choice-of-venue clauses in a wall of text no one reads is a common corporate practice, but as Nate Raymond at Reuters points out, X is not even located in the Northern District of Texas. (It’s next door, in the Western District.) The simplest explanation here is that Musk decided that O’Connor’s court is convenient for a different reason: If he gets sued, his odds of success with a Tesla shareholder presiding seem like they’re probably pretty good, so why bother with anywhere else?
Trying to hand-pick a notably friendly and financially intertwined judge, who works in a geographic area where you aren’t located, to resolve any and all disputes is, even in Musk-adjusted terms, some astonishingly brazen shit. It is also what happens when you combine a legal system that protects corporate interests with toothless recusal rules that judges think of as optional. As if you needed any more reasons not to tweet!
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