Meet Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, the California judge taking on Meta

It’s been a crazy four months for Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

The judge in the Northern District of California spent late April and much of May in her downtown Oakland courtroom, overseeing the high-profile battle between Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

Now, the 61-year-old Gonzalez Rogers is gearing up for week two of a trial that could go a long way in determining the fate of Meta’s advertising business, as California Attorney General Rob Bonta leads a coalition of state AGs in litigating what’s being hailed as social media’s “Big Tobacco moment.”

In between the two trials, Gonzalez Rogers was named chief judge of the court, 15 years after being nominated to serve there by then-President Barack Obama. She replaced Judge Richard Seeborg, who held the role for five years, and takes over at a time when tech companies are bigger and more powerful than ever and artificial intelligence is driving more high-stakes fights into the courtroom.

The district includes San Francisco, where OpenAI is headquartered, as well as all of Silicon Valley, home to Meta and most of its technology peers. For Gonzalez Rogers, the job is the capstone of a 35-year legal career in California, where she began in private practice before being appointed to the Alameda County Superior Court in 2008 by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Known to many as YGR, Gonzalez Rogers has developed a reputation for her no-nonsense attitude.

“I would describe her as a pistol,” said Steve Berman, a managing partner at Hagens Berman who served as co-lead counsel against Big Tobacco in the 1990s and has litigated against Apple before Gonzalez Rogers in several cases. “If lawyers give her bulls—, she just goes after them.”

A native of Houston, Gonzalez Rogers did her undergraduate work at Princeton and received her law degree from the University of Texas. She then joined law firm Cooley in 1991, becoming the firm’s first Latina associate.

During her time as a state judge, she caught the attention of then-Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat. Feinstein, who died in 2023, later recommended Gonzalez Rogers’ nomination to the federal bench to President Obama.

Before the recent cases involving Meta and Musk, Gonzalez Rogers was well known by those who follow Apple.

In 2012, she inherited Pepper v. Apple, an early antitrust challenge to the App Store. IPhone owners alleged Apple forced them to buy apps through its store alone, allowing the company to charge a 30% commission and push prices higher. Gonzalez Rogers initially dismissed the case, though the Supreme Court later took it up and ruled that consumers could sue the company.

Around the same time, Gonzalez Rogers oversaw an antitrust case, involving allegations that Apple unfairly blocked users from playing music from sources other than iTunes and shut out competitors. Apple was victorious.

But her most notable Apple trial took place five years ago, in a case against Epic Games.

In 2020, Epic activated its own payment option inside Fortnite, bypassing Apple’s payment system and its 30% commission. Epic sued Apple after the iPhone maker removed Fortnite from the App Store, accusing the company of illegally controlling the way apps were distributed and payments were processed on iPhones.

After a three-week bench trial in 2021, Gonzalez Rogers largely sided with Apple, finding that Epic had failed to prove Apple was an illegal monopolist. She also determined that Apple’s “anti-steering” rules violated California competition law and ordered the company to allow developers to direct users to outside payment options.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

Last year, Gonzalez Rogers said Apple willfully violated the injunction, writing in a court filing that the company’s vice president of finance “outright lied” to the court about when the company had decided to levy a 27% fee on some purchases linked to its App Store.

“Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies,” Rogers wrote, saying that she considers Apple to “to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.”

Rogers referred the matter to U.S. attorneys to investigate whether to pursue criminal contempt proceedings, though a prosecution never emerged.

Gonzalez Rogers was back in the spotlight earlier this year, as Musk and Altman took their long-standing feud to the courtroom.

In 2024, Musk sued Altman, OpenAI and fellow co-founder Greg Brockman for allegedly “stealing a charity.” After a three-week trial, the advisory jury ruled that Musk, who helped start OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, hadn’t filed his suit in time, ending the case without resolving Musk’s allegations.

Musk called the verdict a “technicality” and vowed to appeal, but Gonzalez Rogers said, in wrapping up the trial, that there’s “a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s finding.”

A spokesperson for Gonzalez Rogers told CNBC that the judge gives jurors a pocket constitution from the Supreme Court bookstore with a signed thank you note for their service.

Like in the Musk-Altman case, Gonzalez Rogers is presiding over a bench trial as the state AGs take on Meta. An advisory jury will hear the evidence and reach a verdict, but the decision isn’t legally binding, and Gonzalez Rogers retains the final say.

Steven Baicker-McKee, a law professor at Duquesne University and an expert in civil procedure, told CNBC that an advisory jury amounts to an add-on to a bench trial.

“You only get an advisory jury where the parties do not have a right to a jury, and the judge could decide the matter on his or her own,” said Baicker-McKee. “An advisory jury allows the judge to gauge how the community feels about a certain event or certain conduct.”

Here’s how Gonzalez Rogers described it in a court filing:

“The issues at play in this impact the daily lives of the public across the states involved,” she wrote. “Thus, the Court deems it prudent to call an advisory jury to solicit the ‘standard of the community.'”

As far as the potential impact of Gonzalez Rogers’ ultimate decision, this could be her most important case yet.

Meta has estimated that potential penalties from the states’ lawsuit could be as high as $1.4 trillion, though Bonta says the states are not demanding that much.

Money isn’t Meta’s biggest concern.

The states allege Meta deliberately used features including infinite scroll, autoplay, likes, push notifications and disappearing content to hook young users on its apps despite knowing of the vulnerabilities. They also accuse Meta of collecting information from children without parental consent and misleading the public about the risks of its platforms. Meta has denied the claims.

Bonta and AGs from Colorado, New Jersey and Kentucky are co-leading the trial and represent a bipartisan group of 29 AGs seeking algorithm alterations that could force Meta to change how it designs and operates features for young users on Facebook and Instagram. Meta is reliant on its algorithms to target advertising, which accounts for 98% of its revenue and is the key source of growth as the company heavily invests in AI.

Opening arguments began on Tuesday, and Bonta reminded reporters after the first day that the trial centers around “civil penalties, restitution and distortion,” and is not primarily about money.

The trial in Gonzalez Rogers’ courtroom is expected to last six to seven weeks. It’s the centerpiece of a larger judicial assignment.

Gonzalez Rogers is overseeing the broader multidistrict litigation consolidating nearly 3,000 pending lawsuits against Meta, TikTok, Snap and YouTube over alleged harms to children and teens.

“She’s super smart, and I think thrives on challenging cases,” Berman said.  “I haven’t always agreed with her in cases I didn’t win. But I know that she’s smart.”

— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian, Lora Kolodny and Kif Leswing contributed to this report.

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