Lifestyle
Tesla’s latest referral program prize includes Tesla Semi unveiling event invitation
Tesla introduced yet another referral program today, the company’s ninth since its July, 2015 inception date. In an email sent to existing Model S and Model X owners, and through a posting on the company’s website, Tesla revealed that participants of its most recent referral program who refer 5 or more vehicle sales will have the opportunity to attend the Tesla Semi unveiling event that’s slated for September 28, 2017.
According to the details outlined in Tesla’s latest referral program, existing owners also have the power to gift free unlimited Supercharging to their choice of five friends that are looking to purchase a Model S or Model X. Other prizes include Radio Flyer’s Tesla Model S for Kids, early access to Tesla’s Solar Roof, and a Founders Series Powerwall 2.
“As a thank you, we will send you a drivable Tesla Model S for Kids with your first referral. With two referrals, you will receive early access to Solar Roof. Tesla owners with three referrals will receive a set of four 21” forged‑aluminum Arachnid wheels. Other awards include a Founders Series Powerwall 2 and a VIP invitation for two to our Tesla Semi Truck Unveil Event.” says Tesla through email.
Today’s program overlaps with the previous referral program which is set to end on June 15, 2017. Because of the overlap, Tesla says that referrals obtained in the last program will also count towards current awards in the new program.
We’ve provided the full details of the newest Tesla Referral Program below. Model S and Model X buyers looking to save $1,000 off the purchase price and receive free unlimited Supercharging, for life, are welcomed to use our referral code.
REFERRAL PROGRAM (May 19 to Dec. 31, 2017)
Starting May 19, 2017, Tesla owners can give five friends free unlimited Supercharging and a $1,000 credit toward a new Model S or Model X with their personal referral code. As a thank you, owners will be eligible to receive exclusive Referral Program awards, including:
1 Qualifying Referral: Founders Series Tesla Model S for Kids
Share the Tesla experience with your kids, with this miniature drivable electric Model S – including working headlights, a sound system, and a charge port, just like yours.
2 Qualifying Referrals: Early Access Token for Solar Roof
Be one of the first to get Solar Roof with this early-access token for priority scheduling of a Solar Roof installation. If you do not use this award, the token may be given to a friend.
3 Qualifying Referrals: 21” Arachnid Wheels
Enhance the performance of your Model S with exclusive 21” forged-aluminum Arachnid wheels in silver. These are not available to the public and will be available for installation in August for winners in this program.
4 Qualifying Referrals: Founders Series Powerwall 2
Store energy for future use and provide backup power with this red, limited-production Powerwall 2 home battery. This edition is not available to the public and will be available for installation starting Fall 2017 for winners in this program. Installation charges may apply.
5 Qualifying Referrals: Tesla Semi Truck Unveil Invitation
Experience the official unveil of our semi truck on September 28, 2017. Your VIP invitation is valid for you and one guest.
Ludicrous P100D Model S or Model X and Private SpaceX Tours
Each qualified referral gets you one entry into our Referral Program drawing. The next drawing will take place on June 30, 2017.
Ludicrous P100D Model S or Model X + Private SpaceX Tour: One referrer will win a Ludicrous P100D Model S or Model X as well as a private tour for four of the SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles, including travel and accommodations. SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. SpaceX headquarters is not open to the public.
SpaceX Tour: Five referrers will win a tour for four of the SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles, including travel and accommodations.
Thank you for helping to accelerate our transition to sustainable energy.
Limits
Related order must be placed between May 19, 2017 and December 31, 2017. Owners with one or more referrals in the previous phase between March 16, 2017 and May 19, 2017 will be eligible for both updated and previous phase awards until June 15, 2017. Referral order vehicles must be actually delivered to qualify for awards. Pre-owned vehicles are not eligible. Model 3 orders are not eligible. Limit of 5 referrals per owner. Referral code must be applied at the time of order and cannot be added after the order has been placed. Free unlimited Supercharging will only apply to the original vehicle owner and only for the duration of original vehicle ownership.
Must be at least 18 years old to be eligible for awards. No entry fee, payment or purchase required for the drawing. A random drawing will be held on or around June 30, 2017 to determine the winners, who will be contacted thereafter. Awards are non-transferable and not redeemable for cash. The customer is responsible for all taxes and local requirements and fees. Customers are responsible for their own travel and accommodations unless otherwise specified. SpaceX tours are subject to the visitor meeting facility entrance eligibility criteria. Program and awards are conditional on and subject to local laws and regulations. Unfortunately, Ohio and Virginia residents are not eligible for awards.
The customer may not be an employee, legal representative or partner of Tesla or any Affiliate of Tesla. Nothing in the Referral Program shall be deemed to create any kind of relationship between the referrer and Tesla or any of Tesla’s Affiliates. The referrer has no authority to represent or bind Tesla. Terms and conditions are subject to change. Some awards including the Semi Unveil Invitation may be updated on or after August 15, 2017.
Good Faith
We introduce programs such as these in good faith and expect the same good faith in return. Please note that we may withhold awards where we believe customers are acting in bad faith or otherwise acting contrary to the intent of this program. To be clear, commercializing or otherwise selling referral codes is not appropriate, and we will not honor such codes. We cannot cover every nefarious scenario, nor will we attempt to, but we do promise to be fair and reasonable.
Lifestyle
Tesla Cybertruck targets job site crews with new Tailgate Utility Track and Bed Gear Box accessory
Tesla launched a $350 tailgate track and a $985 lockable Bed Gear Box for Cybertruck.
Tesla’s Cybertruck team added two more items to the Tesla Shop, targeting job site crews and owners who use the truck bed for actual work rather than just showing it off. The official Cybertruck X account posted the Tailgate Utility Track and the Bed Gear Box within minutes of each other, part of a five item batch that also included a reflective jacket, a spray paint hat and an updated reflective tee.
The Tailgate Utility Track runs $350 and turns the folded down tailgate into another mounting surface. It’s a single aluminum track with a T-slot for sliding accessories and two L-track attachment points, plus two load stops included in the box. The pitch is straightforward: strap down oversized cargo, like lumber or a cooler, that hangs off the back of the bed without it sliding out mid-drive. It bolts onto the existing tailgate and works on every Cybertruck trim.
Tailgate Utility Trackhttps://t.co/PCAYXlFBvS pic.twitter.com/sCV2NVxf1W
— Cybertruck (@cybertruck) September 3, 2026
The Bed Gear Box costs $985 and is a different kind of accessory. It’s a lockable aluminum storage box, 55.78 inches long, 19.8 inches wide and 7.79 inches tall, that mounts to the bed’s L-track rails and comes with two internal bins for smaller items. According to Tesla, at just over 57 pounds empty, it’s meant to stay in place rather than come in and out with each trip, giving owners a factory-fit alternative to loose totes for tools, recovery gear or emergency supplies. Tesla’s listing notes that Long Range and Dual Motor AWD Cybertrucks need the L-Tracks accessory installed separately before the Gear Box will mount, since L-tracks come standard only on certain configurations.
Both accessories lean on the idea Tesla has been building toward since Elon Musk first described the Cybertruck’s third-party attachment strategy at the 2023 shareholder meeting, when he said the truck would ship with mounting points so outside companies, and Tesla itself, could keep adding gear without redesigning the bed. That’s the same L-track backbone underneath the tailgate shield and jumpseats Tesla launched last year, and the off-road armor package that arrived through the same X account in 2025.
Owners looking to round out the rest of the L-track ecosystem, cargo dividers, MOLLE panels, bed racks and similar gear, can find a wider range of options through our Cybertruck accessories collection.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years
Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.
Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.
In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.
The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.
But we do need to act much faster than that if people still want to live where the beach is today. We have about 50 years or so to take action, which should be more than enough time for the space satellites to solve any heating problems. https://t.co/xhrVQALwQw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.
This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.
Lifestyle
Police sergeant recounts his Neuralink journey with Elon Musk’s brain chip
A former Vancouver police sergeant with ALS accounts his journey to become a patient for Elon Musk’s Neuralink wireless brain-computer interface technology.
“I’m texting you from my brain right now.” That was the first message Lee Marten sent after waking up from Neuralink surgery, five hours and one migraine after dozens of threads were stitched into his motor cortex.
Marten, a former Vancouver police sergeant, is one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive Neuralink’s N1 brain implant, and the 26th recipient overall. He tells his story in a first-person account published by Maclean’s.
Marten recounts how he was a healthy, athletic Vancouver police sergeant until April 2022 when symptoms of muscle twitching and balance loss, were followed by a bad fall that broke his leg. He would eventually be diagnosed with ALS in early 2025 at the age of 47. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that progressively destroys the motor neurons controlling voluntary muscle movement, eventually taking away a patient’s ability to walk, speak, swallow and breathe. There’s no cure, and most patients live two to five years after diagnosis.
He describes the devastation of the diagnosis and how he began preparing for it while connecting with other young ALS patients through a WhatsApp group called Young Guns. Through that group he learned about a Neuralink clinical trial at Toronto Western Hospital and, after a roughly seven-month vetting process (physical assessments, psychiatric evaluation, a final interview with the Neuralink team), was accepted this past April as the trial’s 26th recipient and the first Canadian ALS patient to get the N1 implant. He recounts the May surgery in detail, including the robotic system that stitched 64 threads into his brain, and describes the app, Link, translating his neural signals into cursor control, which he was using within hours of waking up.
Marten walks through what daily use looks like, including weekly “brain training” exercises, a real-time neural-activity display, charging the implant via a beanie-mounted MagSafe charger, and using the implant for emailing, texting, social media, and gaming via a “Magic Box” that connects it to other devices. He also gives brief context on brain-computer interface history and quite candid about Musk, calling him “divisive” but saying he found him “easy to admire.
The piece closes on a heavier note, with Marten seeking to pursue medical assistance in dying as his symptoms progressed, noting that he’ll be able to communicate his final words to his family through Neuralink rather than facing a silent decline. He expresses hope the data from his case will help future ALS patients, even without a cure in his own lifetime.
