Lifestyle
Elon Musk delivered Jay Leno his first Tesla and it’s still on his mind
Jay Leno’s legendary career in television led to him chasing his passion for driving and owning the fastest, most expensive, and most unique vehicles in the world. On April 19, Leno released previously unseen footage of a young Tesla CEO Elon Musk, bringing him the first production model of the Roadster.
Perhaps what is most impressive is that twelve years later, Tesla continues to quench Leno’s thirst for automobiles, despite owning some of the rarest and most sought after cars in the world. The 2008 Roadster ignited Jay’s interest in the next generation of high-performance and electrified transportation. Before taking the silent sports car for a spin throughout Los Angeles, Leno was educated on the vehicle’s finer points from Elon Musk himself.
Leno and Musk’s relationship started at the former late-night show host’s garage in Los Angeles. Musk delivered the first-ever Tesla Roadster to Leno during an overcast day in 2008, where the CEO of the then-named “Tesla Motors” took Jay through a crash course of how the electric vehicle startup was building its initial vehicle.
The Roadster’s design was based on the Lotus Elise but utilized no Lotus parts for its exterior. The body was made out of carbon fiber and manufactured by French supplier Sotira. The 6,831 battery cells were put into a pack with blades and powered the battery enough to give the car 244 miles of EPA estimated range when fully charged. The vehicle’s weight was roughly 30% heavier than its inspiration in the Lotus; it offered a longer body and a battery pack that contributed significantly to the increase in mass.
Leno was impressed by the instant torque, the aerodynamics, and the aesthetically-pleasing shape of the car. “I just want to say, it’s a real sports car, it handles good, it’s fast, and hey, if this is the future, I’m not that worried,” Leno yells into his microphone before speeding away.
Fast forward eleven years later in November 2019. In Hawthorne, California, at a rocket ship manufacturing facility, Tesla is at it again. This time, it was unveiling its sixth vehicle, The Cybertruck, which would inevitably end up in the hands of Jay Leno in January 2020, after it was spotted outside SpaceX headquarters during the filming a segment of Jay Leno’s Garage.
Leno’s collection of cars includes some of the best and most rare vehicles on Earth. Despite having a garage filled with automobiles that is worth an estimated $52 million, his commentary when describing Tesla’s vehicles speaks for itself.
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A vocal supporter of the electric vehicle movement and Tesla in specific, Leno said his love for the electric vehicle company comes from a battery car’s clear-as-day advantage over internal combustion engines. “There’s no maintenance. They’re faster than the gas car. So there’s almost no reason to have a gas car unless you’re doing long-haul duty.”
Leno sees a future that involves more electric vehicles than internal combustion ones. His extensive knowledge of the automotive industry describes a transition that seems to be the equivalent of when gas cars took over in 1911,” he said to CNBC. “Steam ran everything from 1800 to about 1911. Then internal combustion took over from 1911 to right about now. And I predict that a child born today probably has as much chance of driving in a gas car as people today have been driving a car with a stick shift.”
In a world where any car is available to Leno, his decision to continuously mention Tesla shows the impressive nature of the company’s cars. Twelve years after the talk show host and comedian drove the Roadster, it remains on his mind. So much so that it incited him to share with the world footage that has not been seen before.
Watch Jay Leno’s throwback footage of the 2008 Tesla Roadster below.
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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