Lifestyle
Elon Musk charms China’s social media with frugal food, accommodation choices
Elon Musk’s visit to China was productive. He visited Gigafactory 3, attended an AI conference, and met with several government officials. Yet, after his trip, Musk left the country with more respect from China’s social media users, particularly because, of all things, his frugal accommodations and food choices.
Musk is no stranger to discomfort. During the Model X production ramp, Musk made headlines when it was revealed that he was sleeping in the Fremont factory to help address any issues that might arise in the SUV’s production line. The CEO repeated this during the Model 3’s “production hell,” a period Musk admitted was one of the most challenging he has experienced in his career.
It is then quite unsurprising that when Elon Musk headed last week to China, he opted to stay at accommodations that are practica. Unlike conventional CEOs who tend to treat themselves only to the best amenities available, Musk opted to stay at a Holiday Inn during his busy trip.
As Musk headed to Beijing last Friday, the CEO was spotted by social media users together with his fellow executives eating at a famous, low-key Baozi (filled bun) shop for lunch. The restaurant is well-known in the area, but it is still very simple and significantly less fancy compared to fine dining areas in the city, with an order of dumplings priced at just 6 yuan (84 US cents). Musk and his fellow execs did not receive any special treatment while they dined either, as the team waited in line for food just like with everyone else in the restaurant.
While Musk is among the world’s wealthiest with an estimated net worth of around $19 billion, he is no stranger to roughing it out when needed. During the early days of his and his brother Kimbal’s first company, Zip2, for example, Musk burned the midnight oil on a near-consistent basis, and it was not common to find him just sleeping at a bean bag near his workstation, having practically passed out from work. When Tesla and SpaceX were both in dire straits during the middle of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, Musk would regularly sleep on friends’ couches as needed.
In Ashlee Vance’s book, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Google CEO Larry Page joked that despite the wealth that Musk had accumulated over his career, his accommodations have not always been the best. “He’s kind of homeless, which I think is sort of funny. He’ll e-mail and say, ‘I don’t know where to stay tonight. Can I come over?’ I haven’t given him a key or anything yet,” Page lightly said.
Perhaps Musk’s willingness to forego the plushiest, most comfortable amenities are quite unusual for someone of his stature. Nevertheless, for China’s social media community, at least, such characteristics are worthy of approval, and perhaps even admiration.
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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.
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