Elon Musk flies to Eastern Sierra as SpaceX buys Cursor for $60 billion

Elon Musk flew his Gulfstream G650ER, tail N628TS, from McAllen, Texas, to Eastern Sierra Regional Airport in Bishop, California, on the evening of June 19, 2026. The 2-hour 38-minute flight arrived just after 6 p.m. local time, touching down in the Owens Valley near the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada.

The trip lands the same week SpaceX announced its $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Cursor, the AI coding startup, as reported by Founded on June 16. The deal, SpaceX's first major purchase since its record-breaking Nasdaq debut, is meant to bolster the coding capabilities of Grok, the chatbot built by xAI — which merged into SpaceX in February. Cursor's 25-year-old cofounder Michael Truell wrote to employees that the team looks forward to working with SpaceX on building the world's most useful AI models.

Bishop is not a typical Musk destination; his aircraft more frequently shuttle between Austin, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Brownsville. The Eastern Sierra landing may point to a retreat or meeting away from the usual tech corridors — a quiet arrival during a week when Musk's legal team also saw his OpenAI lawsuit dismissed on procedural grounds and the DOJ intervened to defend xAI's unpermitted Memphis gas turbines as a matter of national security, per Electrek.