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Tesla fans deliver Elon Musk’s new couch, raise $18k for charity

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The Tesla community recently got together to crowdfund a new couch for Elon Musk, after it was revealed in a CBS This Morning segment that the sofa Musk was sleeping on in the Fremont factory was incredibly uncomfortable.

Tesla fans across the globe pitched in for the crowdfunded campaign, resulting in more than $8,000 in total money raised. As could be seen in a recently-uploaded YouTube video, the new couch has been delivered to Fremont, and the proceeds of the campaign will now be given, in its entirety, to charity.

A video featuring the delivery of Elon Musk’s new couch was uploaded by YouTuber and Teslanomics host Ben Sullins, who started the GoFundMe campaign. According to Ben, Elon’s new couch was donated by Wayfair, enabling the entire crowdsourced amount to be given to a humanitarian organization. Ben shared some photos from the sofa’s delivery, and based on the images; it seems like Elon Musk’s new couch is indeed very comfortable. Wayfair appears to have given a shoutout to Tesla, as well, as the couch the company donated was called a Model: S 164 sofabed.

Ben Sullins’ GoFundMe campaign raised almost $8,000 for Elon Musk’s new couch. Tesla Club of Sweden raised another $1,500. The proceeds from the GoFundMe drive would be given to Renewable World, a UK-based charity which conducts projects aimed at fighting poverty through renewable energy. Among Renewable World’s ongoing initiatives is in Nepal, where the organization is helping residents get back on their feet amid the aftereffects of a devastating earthquake back in 2015.

As noted by the Teslanomics host, however, Tesla decided to add a final twist to the Tesla community’s total donation. The electric car maker opted to match the proceeds from the fundraiser dollar-for-dollar, giving Renewable World a far more substantial amount.

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“Now Tesla, I thought, originally was only gonna donate the cost of the couch. But since Wayfair donated the couch, Tesla is going to be matching the entire donation — the entire thing. So all $8,000, close to $8,000 that we raised, plus the $1,500 from the Tesla Club of Sweden, we collectively are over $18,000 — money raised going to charity from a simple, little joke idea,” Ben said in his video.  

Ben’s video included a clip from Renewable World, where the organization thanked everyone who contributed to the GoFundMe campaign. According to the charity, the donation would aid their projects across the globe, including communities in Kenya, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

The Tesla community, from electric car owners to the company’s executives, have been involved in heartwarming, altruistic projects in the past. Earlier this year, members of the Tesla community got together to make the wish of Dr. Matthew Chan, a cancer-stricken Model X owner, come true. During that time, the Tesla superfan was given a special tour of the Fremont factory, including an extended meet-and-greet with Franz von Holzhausen and a test drive with a Model 3. Elon Musk took some time to converse with Dr. Chan as well, with the CEO speaking with the Tesla owner before heading to the facility.

Watch Ben Sullins’ video featuring the delivery of Elon Musk’s new couch below.

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Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s answer to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey got way more specific

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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.


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.”

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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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tesla diner

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.

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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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