Lifestyle
A First-hand Account of the Tesla D Event, Part 1
So, we finally saw #ElonsD and … we liked it.
The night started off young but we knew we had a long evening of journalistic duties ahead of us. Half of the team was already tweeting furiously as they approached a relatively empty Hawthorne Design Center at 5pm PST while the other half was making their way through a hellish back up of cars all looking to squeeze into a single parking entrance.
The Madness Begins
Any sort of driving etiquette that one would normally have was completely thrown out the window that night. I saw Model S after Model S making dangerous illegal U-turns right in the middle of a busy main street just to get an edge in line, but in reality it was just a silent FU to the ones that had already sat in the 1 mile back up of cars waiting to get in – me included. The sounds of EDM music heard from a distance is somehow pumping in sync with the rhythm of my heart. I find my patience beginning to draw a direct correlation with the number of cars behind us that are seen turning out of lane only to muscle their way back into the same turn lane 1/2 mile ahead. The more cars turning out, the less my patience became.
To make things worse, one of our tech guys is on the phone letting us know that the servers came to a halt after receiving an unexpected surge in worldwide traffic to our live-tweet page. The world was watching but the only thing I can think of was why Taylor Swift is playing in the background of our tech guys house. Wait …. the server, oh right.
Upgrade, upgrade, hurry!, I impatiently direct while also making sure I continue to inch forward without creating a big enough gap that would allow line-cutters to squeeze in. I wouldn’t normally do this, but having already let at least 20+ cars cut ahead, on top of the irritating beats of techno resonating throughout my cerebral cortex, I somehow felt justified to put myself into A-hole mode that night. Please forgive me.
Five minutes later, additional servers were added, Taylor Swift was still heard singing across the speaker phone and I was a happy camper again. I’m ready for #ElonsD.
Tesla D event seen and heard from the freeway
So Close, Yet So Far
After 45 minutes of standstill traffic, I finally reach the gates to the parking lot entrance. A combination of frantic Tesla parking attendants and police officers guide me through a windy maze of people and cars. I make eye contact with a Tesla attendant that’s 5 feet from my windshield; he points an orange glowing baton to the right; I go right.
“OK sir, please leave your keys here,”. I eagerly step out of the car, grab the camera gear and make my way all the way back to the end of the line where another wait begins. At this point I’m just passing time reading some of Dennis’s (@dennis_p) and Sam’s (@TeslaMS60) tweets. Head down, reading tweets and walking blindly into people like a digital zombie – something I laugh at when I see others doing it, but tonight it was my turn.
I secretly curse at Sam beneath my breath after seeing that he’s already inside and helping himself to a drink. Nicolas is telling me how great of a time he’s having inside while I stare helplessly at the big D in the distance. I begin to think of all the words that begin with the letter D but can only come up with one. Repeated thoughts of cutting the line run rampant in my head. Should I pull the “I have a press pass” card (which I didn’t this time) or wait patiently like every other civilized person in line? I pulled the press pass of course.
Kidding about the press pass. Another 20 or so minutes go by in line and a hysteria of people begin piling into the parking area. Some are seen biking to the event while others are walking in with entire family in tow – stroller and all. Based on the conversation I’m hearing from people in line, it seems as if most are just there for the spectacle and came by way of a +1 on someone else’s invite.
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The music was getting louder and I was getting closer to the official entrance. The rhythmic sounds of EDM was actually becoming more pleasant to listen to. Maybe because I could see the sights of the red carpet ahead of me and I knew it would be just minutes before I would make my way into the holy land.
What lay before me and the official entry to the event was 30ft and a check-in desk, except I didn’t need to check-in at all. Apparently Tesla was so overwhelmed by the volume of people that showed up (the official count was over 4,000 people) that they decided to just hand out wristbands to all that showed up at the check-in desk. OK, sounds good to me. I grabbed the wristband and made my way to the red carpet, pausing for a moment to decide whether I wanted to do a few gratuitous selfies along the Tesla D backdrop, or take the less glamorous path to the right.
In my head, I had already put away all sense of humility and pictured myself doing the robot, a flying jump kick and giving two tickets to the gun show on the red carpet, but I knew that would likely scare the attendees, or at the very least, make Tesla staff question my sanity and deny my entry. I walked to the right and made my way into the event.
After an hour and a half wait, I was finally in but what happened next was something I would have never imagined take place. See Part 2
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Elon Musk escalated his monthslong feud with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this week, pledging that his own AI video tool will produce a competing version before the year is out. Responding to a fan-made, AI-generated clip of the ancient epic, Musk wrote on X, “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
In June, Musk quoted an xAI-shared trailer built entirely with Grok Imagine Video 1.5, a two-minute-plus reimagining of The Odyssey styled after a 1970s classical Hollywood epic, and predicted “full movies by the end of the year,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That trailer, built from 36 consistent shots by a single creator, was Musk’s proof of concept. This week’s pledge turns that prediction into a specific commitment, tied directly to Homer’s text rather than a generic demo.
Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer https://t.co/bVHzUmY9WN
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2026
When a fan separately proposed that Musk fund a live-action alternative, to “give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek,” Musk replied with two words: “I’m down.”
The Grok Imagine pledge lands as the tool’s underlying infrastructure has changed hands. Grok is no longer a standalone product, it folded into SpaceXAI after SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI closed in February, meaning the compute behind any Odyssey production traces back to the same Colossus supercomputers now bundled into SpaceX’s pitch to investors. Musk has separately said SpaceX’s own engineering data is being fed into the next major Grok training run, a two trillion parameter model he’s called the “2T run.”
Whether Grok Imagine can sustain a feature length narrative, rather than a series of impressive individual shots, remains the open question.
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Cybertruck
Tesla Mobile App gets a new feature that wrap fans are going to love
Tesla’s Summer Update removes the USB drive step from customizing your car’s digital wrap design.
Tesla’s latest 2026 Summer Update quietly closes out one of the more tedious steps in personalizing a Tesla’s digital appearance. Uploading a custom wrap design used to require a USB drive. Now it doesn’t.
The feature is listed in Tesla’s release notes as “Send Custom Wraps from Mobile App.” The company described it plainly: “Skip the USB drive and upload a custom wrap of your car from the mobile app. Instructions for creating a custom wrap here: github.com/teslamotors/custom-wraps.”
The digital wrap tool has been around since Tesla’s 2024 Holiday Update, when it launched for Cybertruck owners first, as Teslarati reported at the time. Getting a design onto the car meant formatting a USB drive, creating a folder named exactly “Wraps,” dropping in PNG files sized between 512×512 and 1024×1024 pixels and under 1 MB each, then plugging the drive in and applying the wrap through Toybox. Tesla expanded the tool to other models and renamed it from “Colorizer” to “Paint Shop” with the 2025 Holiday Update, while also adding license plate and window tint customization alongside the wraps.
Custom wraps via mobile app https://t.co/5OydZ26g9p pic.twitter.com/uexU0ZePxu
— Tesla (@Tesla) July 22, 2026
The latest Summer Update removes the USB step from that process. Owners will be able to pull a design from wherever they saved it, whether that’s a download from social media or something built from Tesla’s own GitHub templates, and push it to the car directly through the app.
Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more
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It’s a small fix relative to the rest of this latest release, which also included expanded Grok voice commands, automatic navigation that learns regular routes, and self-driving stats inside the mobile app, all detailed in our rundown of the full Summer Update. The USB requirement was one of the more common complaints about Paint Shop since it launched. Tesla did not say when the wrap upload change would reach individual vehicles, only that the broader update is rolling out now in waves.
Elon Musk
Tesla Diner is throwing a birthday party with a Franz-signed special treat
Tesla Diner turns one on July 21 with Optimus, roller skates, and a Franz-signed hat.
Tesla is throwing its Hollywood Diner a first birthday party on July 21 and the celebration comes with a guest list of unique items, including a limited run of Tesla Diner birthday hats personally signed by Tesla Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen for the first 50 customers who place an in-car order at midnight.
One year after lines wrapped around the block on Santa Monica Boulevard for a diner that most of the restaurant industry did not take seriously, Tesla is making the case that the concept was worth the years it took to build. The concept had been in Musk’s head since at least 2018, when he floated the idea of “an old school drive-in, roller skates and rock restaurant” on X, describing it years later as “‘Grease’ meets ‘The Jetsons’ with Supercharging.”
Tesla Optimus Gen 3 is coming to the Tesla Diner with new ambitions
What made the diner genuinely different from any restaurant that came before it was not the menu or the nostalgia. It was the ordering model. Tesla owners could place food orders directly from their vehicle’s touchscreen before arriving, a small feature that hints at something much larger on the horizon. As the Cybercab and unsupervised FSD expand across major cities, the diner model becomes a template for an entirely new kind of commerce. A robotaxi pulling in to charge does not need a human to walk up to a counter. The vehicle places the order, the food is ready on arrival, and the passenger never interrupts the experience of being driven somewhere else. It is the first glimpse of what drive-through commerce looks like when the car is doing the driving.
As Teslarati has reported, Musk signaled immediately after opening that the Hollywood location was only the beginning, posting that Tesla would expand the concept to major cities worldwide and along Supercharger corridors on long-distance routes if the first location proved successful. One year in, the birthday celebration on July 21 makes a strong case that it has. Tesla announced a full day of events including a Cybercab on display, a birthday menu, Optimus in attendance, face painting, a photo booth, roller skating servers, a light show, a Skypad DJ, and complimentary collectibles.
If Musk’s ambition holds, the Hollywood diner is year one of something much bigger. The birthday party is the proof of concept. The robotaxi fleet is the business model waiting behind it.
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Tesla Diner is turning 1 on July 21st, so we’re throwing a party
Come swing by for a day full of fun:
– Cybercab on display
– Birthday menu
– @Tesla_Optimus
– Face painting for kids & adults
– Photo booth
– Servers on roller skates delivering your order
– Light show
– Skypad DJ… pic.twitter.com/TD8pOjihYs— Tesla North America (@tesla_na) July 18, 2026
SpaceX wants to catch Starship for launch 14, Elon Musk says
Tesla to open source Model S and Model X designs and software
