Elon Musk returns to the Rio Grande Valley after a TERAFAB announcement in California

Elon Musk flew from Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View, California, to a landing near his Starbase home in the Rio Grande Valley on May 22, 2026, a 3-hour 20-minute hop aboard the Gulfstream G550 N272BG.

The same week, Musk hosted the unveiling of TERAFAB, the $20–25 billion Tesla-SpaceX-xAI chipmaking joint venture planned for Austin, per a Sunday presentation covered by Bloomberg and The Business Times. The flight also follows a last-minute scrub of Starship Flight 12's first launch attempt on May 21, when a hydraulic pin on the tower's catch arm failed to retract; SpaceX immediately called a second attempt for the evening of May 22, as SpaceNews reported.

The landing pattern fits Musk's established rhythms: he maintains a $50K rented home one block from the Boca Chica launch facility, and his fleet of five Gulfstreams repeatedly shuttles between Starbase (KBRO-area), Austin (KAUS), Silicon Valley (KSJC/KNUQ), and Los Angeles (KLAX). Recent flights show him in Southern California and the Bay Area earlier the same day — a characteristic multi-stop routing for an executive whose three largest ventures now share a single semiconductor supply chain.