Elon Musk lands at Moffett the day after xAI’s second legal loss to OpenAI

Elon Musk flew from Hawthorne to Moffett Federal Airfield on June 17, a 48-minute hop aboard his Gulfstream G550 N272BG. The trip deposits him in Silicon Valley the same week his artificial intelligence company xAI suffered its second legal defeat to OpenAI in a month. On June 16, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin dismissed xAI’s trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI with prejudice, ruling the company failed to show OpenAI induced a former senior engineer to leak confidential information related to the Grok chatbot [coingape.com]. The dismissal followed a federal jury’s rejection of Musk’s $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI in May [frontiernews.ai].

Musk’s arrival also coincides with a Trump administration push to kill a separate Clean Air Act lawsuit against xAI’s Mississippi data center. The Justice Department filed a brief on June 15 arguing the facility is vital to national security, revealing that the Pentagon’s Project Maven already uses Grok for targeting in strikes against Iran [ibtimes.sg][arynews.tv]. The environmental case, brought by the NAACP, alleges xAI operated 57 gas turbines without permits in majority-Black neighborhoods.

This is Musk’s second Bay Area visit in recent days; he flew from Moffett to Seattle on June 13 and back to Hawthorne on June 15 before today’s return. The pattern reflects his ongoing entanglement with both the legal system and the military’s expanding use of xAI technology—a combination that keeps his Gulfstream shuttling between Starbase, courtrooms, and the corridors of power in Washington and Silicon Valley.