Jessica Mathews here, filling in for Allie to give you a quick update on some recent reporting that looks at the pushback that Elon Musk’s companies are getting around the country.
Last week, I wrote about the lawsuit that Baltimore’s mayor and city council had filed against xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company. The lawsuit accuses Grok of exposing residents to the risk that any photograph they uploaded—of themselves or of their children—could be ingested by Grok and transformed into sexually degrading deepfakes without their knowledge or consent.
Not long after that lawsuit was filed, the Baltimore Ravens’ football team announced it was walking away from a tunnel proposal it had pitched to Boring Company, for a free tunnel project around its Ravens stadium. And the Baltimore Mayor, a Democrat, said publicly that he wouldn’t have approved it anyway.
The sentiment shift in Baltimore, in particular, was notable, as the city had a decade ago welcomed Elon Musk’s business with open arms.
Here’s more, from the story:
Maryland and Baltimore have historically welcomed Musk’s companies through incentives and partnerships. Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, was one of the first politicians to publicly get behind a major Boring Company project in 2017, when Boring Company announced it planned to build a high-speed tunnel for autonomous vehicles between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The Maryland Department of Transportation sponsored the project, and Baltimore’s then-Mayor, a Democrat, had said the project would have “tremendous potential.”
That posture has shifted since Musk donated $300 million to President Trump’s campaign and took a hands-on role in government through DOGE. Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, was an early critic of Musk’s work at DOGE, characterizing the firing of thousands of federal workers in 2025 as “arbitrary” and “draconian” during a working session in March 2025 and saying it was cruel. Boring Company president Steve Davis, one of Musk’s longtime trusted fixers, helped Musk run the government department.
Meanwhile, in Las Vegas—where Boring has had repeated safety and environmental problems—two legislators recently sent a demand letter to Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, requesting he address “structural failures” in the state’s oversight of Elon Musk’s tunneling startup, which has been digging tunnels below Las Vegas. The two state legislators, Assemblymember Howard Watts and Senator Rochelle Nguyen, sent a letter to the Governor, describing “significant concerns about record integrity, administrative accountability, and structural failures” in Nevada’s workplace safety system and saying that they “require clear action from the Executive Branch.”
The pushback is largely coming from Democrats and illustrates the challenges Musk’s collection of companies are receiving as the famously impulsive and truculent multi-billionaire has turned himself into a political lightning rod.
See you tomorrow,
Jessica Mathews
X: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
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