Elon Musk’s companies, once welcomed in Baltimore with open arms, are now getting stiff-armed—or sued

Even a free infrastructure project wasn’t enough to convince Maryland officials to work with Elon Musk.

On Tuesday, Elon Musk’s tunnelling business, the Boring Company, started discussions with city officials about building a free tunnel around the Baltimore Ravens’ football stadium. While the free project seemed like a coup for the Ravens, who had pitched it to the Boring Co., the idea was short-lived. Within nine hours of the announcement, Baltimore’s mayor and city council had filed a lawsuit against xAI, an AI company also owned by Musk, alleging that its chatbot “flooded” users’ feeds with nonconsensual intimate imagery and child sexual abuse material.

On Wednesday, the Ravens said that, after conversations with “public partners,” they would walk away from the tunnel proposal. Mayor Scott, a Democrat, said publicly that it was “not something that I would have approved.”

Together, the two moves mark a notable shift in a state that courted Elon Musk’s business with open arms only a decade ago and illustrates the challenges now facing Musk’s collection of companies as the famously impulsive and truculent mulit-billionaire has turned himself into a political lightning rod.

In statements emailed to Fortune, Baltimore’s Ci...