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Tesla rebel mechanic of ‘Rich Rebuilds’ to sit down with Joe Rogan in JRE podcast

Rich Benoit of Rich Rebuilds to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience April 30, 2019. | Image: Rich Benoit/Instagram

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Tesla-refurbishing hobby mechanic Rich Benoit of the Rich Rebuilds YouTube channel will be interviewed April 30th on the Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) podcast at 12 pm PDT. The guest studio chair once sat in by Tesla CEO Elon Musk during his notorious cannabis puff will now be filled by a man who works hard to educate Tesla owners on how to repair their own cars, often against the all-electric auto maker’s resistance.

After beginning a journey to salvage a flooded Tesla Model S in 2016 and chronicling the effort on his YouTube channel, Rich hit frequent roadblocks while trying to obtain parts and servicing information from the all-electric auto manufacturer. Tesla refused to sell him replacement parts for the vehicle, citing safety concerns, but Rich’s determination eventually pulled through. The rescued Model S, nicknamed ‘Dolores’, is now complete and regularly used for his personal travels.

I was able to catch up with Rich via phone while he was on his way to the JRE location, and of course, one of my first questions was whether he would repeat Musk’s ‘stunt’ whether it be in tribute or in irony. “I’m bringing edibles,” he answered jokingly. “I’ll pop brownies based on how quickly the conversation goes downhill…After fifteen minutes, I’ll start with like three.” I should warn that Rich uses a lot of sarcasm in his humor.

We then discussed what kind of conversation he was expecting on the show (he has no idea) and whether he was given any advance outline of the topics that might come up (none whatsoever). “Actually, I’m not even sure this whole thing is happening,” he admitted. “I haven’t really heard anything else from [JRE] since booking it, so hopefully I’m not gonna show up and they don’t know who I am or why I’m there.”

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He was laughing, but his nerves were still wrapped up in the whole situation. On one hand, Joe Rogan has a very large audience reach that can introduce all sorts of communities to Rich’s projects and mission. On the other hand, he doesn’t even have solid confirmation that the interview will take place as scheduled.

“I emailed the guy about it, and he said they’re ‘probably’ good for it. Like, probably? I’m already in California! I at least better get a picture with Joe,” he mused. Rich is from Salem, Massachusetts.

The first salvage Tesla Model S that Rich Benoit of Rich Rebuilds repaired and restored to driving condition. | Image: Rich Benoit/Instagram

This led to my other introductory question. How did he connect with Rogan? I was particularly interested in the behind-the-scenes booking process. Turns out, there wasn’t much to it. The show was scheduled via email – Joe Rogan’s booking manager contacted him and they set a date and time for Rich to appear. After confirming, Rich mentioned the booking on his YouTube channel, but it was kind of buried in between a status update on his latest refurbishing project and an honesty check for used Model 3 sellers.”Well, Joe Rogan, that show is forever,” Rich told me when I asked why he didn’t give the show appearance its own video or do more to promote it. In his view, anyone who didn’t catch the live stream of The Joe Rogan Experience could watch it later on YouTube, and he’d link and refer to it in future videos.

I’d also seen that an article about Rich on the front page of The Boston Globe was shared by Joe Rogan on Twitter and met with a positive response. “A lot of my followers and subscribers are also fans of [Rogan], so when he posted that article, they started asking him to have me on,” Rich explained. He was obviously excited to have the opportunity.

“ITS HAPPENINNNNGGGGGG big shout out to all my fans that bullied Joe Rogan into having me on his show. April 30th LIVE from CA! You guys remember the infamous Elon Musk interview? Well this will be the generic store brand version,” he shared on his Instagram shortly after confirming the booking.

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Rich Benoit of Rich Rebuilds to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience April 30, 2019. | Image: Rich Benoit/Instagram

Several of the Rich Rebuilds videos document his struggles with Tesla during his repair attempts, now expanded to other vehicles besides Dolores, but Rich’s mission isn’t just about the fight. He says it’s about helping Tesla owners learn more about their cars and to help fill gaps in service that have yet to be filled by the company.

Rich originally began his infamous Tesla Model S salvage project from his home in Salem, but he’s since teamed up with ex-Tesla mechanic and EV Tuning owner Chris Salvo to found the Electrified Garage in Seabrook, New Hampshire. The Rich Rebuilds channel generated significant interest from the Tesla community, and much of it took the form of requests for assistance with vehicle repairs.

“I was never thinking of opening my own shop…But I’d been denied so many times by Tesla that I really started thinking there’s got to be a bigger picture here, another player who can help others and get parts as well. Now there’s a place where people can go for third-party EV repair,” he explained to CNBC in a feature interview.

The Joe Rogan Experience streams its episodes live via the show’s YouTube channel, so be sure to tune in April 30th at 12 pm PDT to hear more about Rich’s Tesla repair journey.

In the meantime, you can watch the videos below for more about Rich’s Tesla salvage projects:

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Accidental computer geek, fascinated by most history and the multiplanetary future on its way. Quite keen on the democratization of space. | It's pronounced day-sha, but I answer to almost any variation thereof.

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Elon Musk

The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville

The Boring Company’s Prufrock MB2 is commissioned and ready to mine beneath Nashville’s streets.

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The Boring Company’s second tunnel boring machine, Prufrock MB2, is officially ready to dig in Nashville. The company confirmed the news on X, posting: “Prufrock-MB2 is ready to mine in Nashville! MB2 commissioning is complete, including the brief 11 rpm rotation shown here. Will MB2 catch up to MB1, who had quite the head start? And Prufrock-MB3 ships in August!”

MB2 arrives with meaningful improvements over its predecessor. Lessons learned from the launch and operation of MB1 have already been applied to MB2 to improve efficiency and prepare the machine for launch.

Traditional tunnel boring machines operate in a stop-and-go cycle, digging roughly five feet, halt, erect precast concrete segments to line the tunnel wall, then resume. That repeated interruption is one of the main reasons conventional tunneling is slow and expensive. Prufrock is designed to install the tunnel liner simultaneously with mining, eliminating the need to stop every five feet. The machine also skips the need for excavated launch pits. Prufrock arrives on a truck, tilts down, and launches into the ground within 24 hours. And when the tunnel is complete, it emerges from the ground and drives to its next launch site on a trailer, eliminating the need for expensive cranes or pit excavation. The machine is also fully electric and runs with zero people in the tunnel during normal operations, controlled remotely from a surface operations center.

It won’t be long before we hear of another major update on The Boring Company’s Music City Loop project – a planned underground transit network beneath Nashville that would move passengers in electric vehicles through a series of tunnels at highway speeds, and bypassing surface traffic entirely. Nashville was selected in part because of its strong rock conditions that suits the Prufrock machines well, and relatively less regulatory hurdles.

Progress has been steady on multiple fronts. All 37 permits and approvals required ahead of tunneling have been obtained, out of 45 total. Key wins include a fully executed TDOT tunnel permit authorizing 25 miles of tunnel, unanimous airport authority approval for a Nashville International Airport station, and the city’s first residential station agreement serving downtown tower residents.

With MB1 already tunneling, MB2 now commissioned, and MB3 shipping in August, Nashville is becoming something of a live proving ground for scaled tunnel boring. The broader ambition is not limited to one city. The Boring Company’s stated goal is to make underground transportation a practical alternative to surface roads across major metro areas. Nashville is one of many cities, including a successful Las Vegas tunnel system, where that idea is being put to the test at real speed.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”

Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.

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Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.

While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure

The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.

Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet

Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.

Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.

As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.

Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.

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Elon Musk

SpaceXAI just launched into your kitchen with their new app

SpaceXAI just powered its first consumer app and it predicts what you want to buy.

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SpaceXAI just made its first move into consumer AI, and it involves your grocery cart. On June 3, 2026, Gopuff and SpaceXAI announced the launch of Go, a Grok-powered shopping assistant built directly into the Gopuff app that predicts what you need before you even start searching for it.

Gopuff is an instant delivery platform that operates more than 400 micro-fulfillment centers across the U.S., delivering everyday essentials, snacks, drinks, and household items in as little as 15 minutes. It is not a restaurant delivery app or a marketplace. It owns its inventory, controls its warehouses, and handles its own logistics, which means it has built one of the most detailed consumer behavior datasets in retail over its 13-year history.

Go combines SpaceXAI’s advanced reasoning, voice, and image generation models with Gopuff’s dataset of hundreds of millions of orders and real-time cultural signals from X to prepare a suggested cart the moment a customer opens the app. It learns each shopper’s habits and automatically builds a personalized cart based on time of day, location, order history, and real-time indicators. Returning customers can check out with a single tap.


Rather than searching for specific items, users can describe a situation like a game-day party or the desire for a healthy breakfast and Go will assemble a cart automatically. It can also predict when shoppers are running low on items like coffee or paper towels and have them packed and delivered in under 15 minutes. Grok voice integration lets users talk to the app in plain conversational language and check out completely hands-free.

Gopuff co-founder and co-CEO Yakir Gola said: “Today, we believe the greatest friction left in commerce is not delivery or instantaneous access to the essentials customers need. It’s the moment before: the thinking, the deciding, the remembering. We’re combining Gopuff’s demand intelligence with xAI’s frontier reasoning to create an everyday shopping experience that feels like a true extension of you.”

Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO

The timing carries context beyond the product launch. SpaceXAI was formed after SpaceX completed an all-stock merger with Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year, folding one of the most advanced AI labs in the world into the same corporate structure as the company preparing what could be the largest IPO in history. SpaceXAI is dipping into consumer-focused AI just as it prepares for its public debut, and while Musk has openly discussed building an everything app, this launch uses Grok to power another company’s product rather than launching a standalone consumer platform. Every consumer-facing deployment of Grok ahead of the IPO roadshow adds tangible evidence that SpaceXAI is not just an infrastructure play but a direct competitor in the AI application layer where OpenAI and Google are already fighting for dominance.

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