Lifestyle
Craft Brewery opens in SpaceX’s backyard, creates special beer for employees
When their shifts are over, SpaceX employees in Hawthorne, CA only have to walk a short way to their favorite new hangout: Los Angeles Ale Works. The soft opening of the area’s first craft brewery a couple of weeks ago has allowed SpaceX employees to personally sample a variety of what will be the house signatures brews — two-dozen taps pouring a wide variety of styles of small batch beer. Starting Thursday, when the grand opening will take place, crowds will descend upon the former industrial building and Hawthorne’s first brewery and tasting room. For now, a bunch of the SpaceX employees and locals have been savoring Los Angeles Ale Works’ inviting space.
Los Angeles Ale Works already serves two varieties named after SpaceX: a low-alcohol session India Pale Ale named Space XPA and a Space XPA Full Thrust double IPA.
“From California citrus to Chinese tea, I want to showcase the whole range of flavor that L.A. is known for,” says Ale Works co-founder Kristofor Barnes, “and the brewery is a great way to work with all the amazing, interesting, and creative people I’ve met through the beer industry.” The brewery, with a modest 10-barrel system, will reportedly offer many taproom-only variants and one-off brews to supplement core offerings, which will be distributed to bars and restaurants around Los Angeles.
Showcasing that variety of ales and lagers, the brewery features a long, L-shaped bar overlooking the brew house. A SpaceX banner drapes from the brewery’s 24-foot-high beams. There’s also a separate custom-built lounge-and-conference room combination with pub games and ample space to chat or tweet. Other than the interesting beer selection, what will probably be Los Angeles Ale Works’ most popular feature is a patio adjacent to the parking lot for some decadent beer-sipping with rays and shades. There is also enough room for some local food trucks to stop by and add their aromas to the fun.
Los Angeles Ale Works is the dream-come-true of head brewer Barnes. In 2013, Los Angeles Ale Works launched its first beers into the marketplace after a successful Kickstarter fundraiser. Working with Ohana Brewing Co, they tenant-brewed proof of concept beers to gather valuable feedback from customers. In 2015, Barnes added business expertise to the office side with Andrew Fowler and Jeff Szafarski, and together the ownership group raised capital.
Now Barnes’ original idea is grounded in brick and mortar. “There’s a huge void of breweries in Hawthorne, and you have this huge high-tech business sector — including SpaceX, Tesla, some of the ancillary companies — so we knew there was a built-in consumer base with those industries,” said Fowler. The affluent and educated SpaceX group is a welcome demographic for Los Angeles Ale Works, which considers itself an experimental brewery.
Set in a handsome 9,600-square-foot brick structure built in 1952 by Northrop Grumman, the brewery is part of an area-wide conversion from dilapidated industrial buildings to upscale destination. Another brewery is expected to open in the same light-industrial zone off El Segundo Boulevard. SpaceX entry into the area served as a magnet for other business, with another architectural evolution currently underway in which a complex of studios under construction nearby will eventually have the capacity to showcase the work of 100 different artists. The area’s rebirth is infusing much more community and aesthetics to this section of town, and “a lot of people are moving into the neighborhood,” Fowler acknowledged.
The original notion of listening to their customer base continues at the new Hawthorne location. Szafarski stated that they intend to solicit beer style ideas from customers and then produce them. “Customer feedback is very important to us. We have a lot of beers on tap that give people a reason to come back tomorrow and not six months from now.”
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The name Los Angeles Ale Works is a nod to the early years of the business, when Barnes borrowed equipment from a downtown Los Angeles brewery.
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.
Elon Musk
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.
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.
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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Tesla Diner is turning 1 on July 21st, so we’re throwing a party
Come swing by for a day full of fun:
– Cybercab on display
– Birthday menu
– @Tesla_Optimus
– Face painting for kids & adults
– Photo booth
– Servers on roller skates delivering your order
– Light show
– Skypad DJ… pic.twitter.com/TD8pOjihYs— Tesla North America (@tesla_na) July 18, 2026
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