In Delaware’s Kathaleen McCormick, Elon Musk Finds A Judge Who Means Business

Could a Delaware native who grew up just a few miles from the Chancery Court push Elon Musk to go through with his Twitter deal?

Kathaleen McCormick wasn’t having it. The Delaware judge hearing Twitter’s case vs. Elon Musk listened incredulously as Musk’s lawyers asked her to postpone the trial. Twitter, they said, had concealed damning vulnerabilities that its ex-head of security, Peiter Zatko, just revealed in a whistleblower report. Zatko’s claims didn’t come up in due diligence when Musk agreed to buy the company, and now they needed more time to sort through them.

No such luck. “We’ll never know, right?” McCormick said, citing Musk’s hasty push toward the deal. “Because the diligence didn’t happen.” The trial would go on as planned, starting on October 17.

Already, a month before the trial begins, Chancellor McCormick is dispatching with the notion that Musk is about to again bowl over the U.S. legal system. The billionaire entrepreneur often seems unbound by law, tending to taunt those who’d dare enforce it, and leading a former Delaware Chancery Court judge to say the court might actually fear ruling against him. McCormick, who took the helm of the court in May 2021, is…