Just four days after Elon Musk announced that he would be selling a limited edition The Boring Company flamethrower, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has confirmed that all 20,000 units of the fiery device have been sold.
Since pre-orders for The Boring Co. flamethrower opened, the device immediately showed signs that it would sell out quickly. In a series of updates just 24 hrs after the device was officially offered, Musk announced that 4,000 flamethrowers had been sold, translating to $2 million worth of reservations. Over the next couple of days, Musk updated the online community with the status of the flamethrower’s remaining stocks, as 7k, 10k, and 15k reservations were announced for Musk’s “very bad idea”.
By Tuesday, Musk noted that only 25 percent of the 20,000 available Boring Company flamethrowers were still available, with 17,500 of the devices already being sold. It did not take long before the last 2,500 were purchased as well. Musk ultimately announced the sale of the last flamethrower on Wednesday, officially ending the limited run of The Boring Company’s most unique product to date. By this time, Musk had managed to raise $10 million for the tunneling startup, which is currently attempting to begin work on a 6.5-mile proof-of-concept tunnel from northeast Westchester to Brentwood.
Flamethrowers sold out
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 1, 2018
The Boring Co. flamethrower seemingly started off as a joke between Musk and his Twitter followers last December. During that time, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO announced that if he manages to sell 50,000 Boring Company hats, he will start selling flamethrowers. The firestarters are yet another nod to sci-fi parody film Spaceballs, one of Musk’s favorite movies. Unlike the Spaceballs merchandise featured in the movie, however, the Boring Company flamethrower ships with a free fire extinguisher.
After unveiling the firestarter to the microblogging platform, Elon Musk has interacted with the Twitterverse quite a lot. Bantering with the online community, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO poked humor at the flamethrowers’ usefulness in a zombie apocalypse. Musk also teased references to The Boring Co. freeze gun, which the CEO joked might follow the fiery device.
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Photo: Teslarati
While The Boring Co. flamethrower has received an immense amount of support from the online community since it was released, the device has managed to attract some serious detractors as well. Just recently, we reported on California assemblyman Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles) expressing his disappointment and outrage at Musk’s portable firestarters, stating that it was a highly irresponsible product that has the capability to hurt a lot of people and cause multiple problems for the state’s fire department and law enforcement.
Despite the assemblyman’s reservations, however, many followers of the self-made billionaire maintained that The Boring Co. flamethrower is just about as dangerous as a conventional propane torch, similar to weed killers that can be purchased at local hardware stores. Overall, while the product had its fill of critics, Elon Musk’s Boring Company flamethrowers have managed to add another $10 million to the startup’s funds.
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.
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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.
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