Lifestyle
Social media and Musk’s vision continues to upend the automotive business model
There is a thin line between success and failure in the automotive business, which is especially the case when your company’s business model upends an entire industry. From the beginning, serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk knew the power of social media and used it to introduce his vision for the future through Tesla and SpaceX, instead of through lavish, broadcast advertising.
Musk presents his vision in many mediums, such as participation in global causes and Q&A sessions with the public, but most importantly via social media. The guru of social marketing did it again recently when he responded to a girl’s suggestion to consider fan-submitted commercials for Tesla, now known as Project Loveday.
Thank you for the lovely letter. That sounds like a great idea. We'll do it! https://t.co/ss2WmkOGyk
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 2, 2017
Project Loveday is brilliant marketing and shows Musk’s humanity. The tweet’s subject matter reminds me of the classic Coke commercial featuring Mean Joe Green and a kid receiving a jersey from the hobbled warrior.
For old-school Tesla freaks, Tesla’s CEO has been working the Twitter feed since the infamous “Tesla breakdown” back in 2012. This centered around a contributing writer at the New York Times and his test drive of the Model S for the publication. His name was John Broder and the main photo that ran with the article was a Model S on the back of tow truck. The car’s battery was dead. Broder ran out of juice.
However, the car logs showed the vehicle doing loops around the city instead of going directly to its destination in Connecticut. Musk shot back at the author and the story gained huge traction in social and traditional media.
-
Fast forward nine months later, I attend the first Supercharger unveiling in Illinois and meet a non-Tesla owner, in his late twenties, that came with other Tesla owners to have lunch. This fellow was a software engineer and told me how he became a reservation holder after the John Broder incident blew up on social media.
This millennial marketing style works because the message cuts through the daily noise and is very authentic. Why don’t more automakers take this cue?
High-five from Elon Musk himself at Century City for the #Model3. Now THAT's a CEO!! pic.twitter.com/cwE38kmxp8
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) March 31, 2016
Recently, electric car advocate Chelsea Sexton mentioned this in a recent Facebook post about how some European fans (or team?) created a Gigafactory 2 in the Minecraft platform. If you have a kid under 12, then you know about Minecraft and its 3-D virtual world, where you can build massive, visual environments via tablet or computer.
Sexton, who did time with General Motors some years ago, mentioned that “this is the umpteenth example of how much the EV industry and movement are missing out by not better leveraging the driver and enthusiast communities.” Sexton should know as she was there when GM killed their first electric car in the nineties.
Even crusty Bob “could have been a contender” Lutz feels CEO visibility is necessary for our fast-moving media landscape. “I do not see the media, or open media exposure, as a negative, says Lutz in his self-congratulatory book, ‘Car Guys vs. Bean Counters.’ “A frank, open, and candid approach, with lots of easy access to the CEO, is a winning strategy.”
-
The irony of crusty Bobby Lutz — paired with gruyere is fantastic — is that he once said that Tesla is “almost like a religious cult” due to the company’s promise of future growth and commanding presence across social media. I think of Apple and their burgeoning cult from the 1990s and early 2000s.
How did that turn out?
Lutz is envious; he never was the top guy at any of the big automakers. Barra at GM doesn’t get it and Marchione does to some degree, but he talks industry consolidation or the “chicken tax” during his media forays. And, dont’ get me wrong, industry consolidation is smart for big automakers but misses on some crucial points: lack of an exciting vision (future), the car consumer and any feeling.
My take is Musk won’t be denied and I’m worried about other U.S. carmakers as they realize how fast the game is changing and don’t have the culture to “think on their feet.”
-
Firmware
Tesla unlocks in-car web conferencing to extend Google Meet, Teams and beyond
Tesla’s Summer Update lets owners join Google Meet, Teams, and Discord calls via cabin camera.
Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update, which just began rolling out to customer vehicles, now links the built-in web browser with the in-cabin camera feed and microphone input, thereby letting owners join video calls on nearly any browser-based service instead of just Zoom.
The change appears in Tesla’s own release notes for software version 2026.26 under “Web Browser,” which states that the vehicle can now use its interior camera and cabin microphone when a website requests access, with permission granted the same way a desktop browser handles it. As NotATeslaApp notes, this feature opens the door to Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and other webcam-enabled sites to activate the in-car cabin-facing camera. The feed automatically crops and zooms to center the driver in frame.
Tesla has offered in-car video calling before, but only through a dedicated Zoom app that launched at the end of 2022, a stripped-down browser preloaded with Zoom’s own web client and gated behind Premium Connectivity. Opening the full browser to any camera-requesting site removes that walled garden. Elon Musk first called video conferencing “definitely a future feature” back in 2020, when the pandemic pushed remote meetings into daily life, so this update effectively finishes something Tesla has been promising for six years.
Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features
The feature keeps the same restrictions that applied to Zoom on Tesla vehicles. It only works while the car is parked; shifting into Drive disables the camera feed, according to the release notes. It is also limited to vehicles running Tesla’s AMD Ryzen infotainment hardware, meaning older Intel-based Model S and Model X units, along with early Model 3 and Model Y builds, don’t get it.
Turning the browser into a general entry point for the in-cabin camera, rather than routing everything through one local app, widens the number of third-party sites that can ask for access, even though Tesla’s permission prompt.
With the Summer update only days into its rollout, be sure to stay with us on TikTok and X to see the latest video demonstrations.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
SpaceX has solved Starship’s biggest challenge, Elon Musk says
SpaceX is coming for wireless giants with Starlink Mobile
