Lifestyle
Elon Musk helps students in MI charter school get access to Chromebooks
Woodland Park Academy, a school in Grand Blanc, MI, will soon be issuing Chromebooks for all its students in the second to eighth grade level. The purchase of the personal cloud-based computers is being funded by a donation from Elon Musk, courtesy of the Musk Foundation.
News of the little-known donation was announced earlier this week, with Woodland Park Academy expressing its gratitude to the Tesla and SpaceX CEO on its official Twitter account. The MI school noted that it was connected to the Musk Foundation through the efforts of young activist Mari Copeny, who has been in touch with Musk as they attempt to help Flint in its ongoing water crisis.
A HUGE thank you to @elonmusk and the @MuskFoundation for the donation that will make access to Chromebooks for every second through eighth-grade student in every classroom a reality! Also, a thank you to @LittleMissFlint for connecting Woodland Park Academy with @MuskFoundation
— Woodland Park Eagle (@WoodlandParkEag) October 10, 2018
Woodland Park Academy is a charter school authorized by Central Michigan University. Charter schools are noted for being public schools of choice, which means that families choose them for their children. These types of schools operate with a certain degree of freedom from some regulations that are imposed on district schools, though they traditionally receive less funding from the government. As such, donations such as those given by the Musk Foundation are greatly appreciated.
Woodland Park Academy, which caters to students from the Kindergarten level all the way up to Grade 8, has around 400 students to date. Considering that Elon Musk’s donation will give Chromebooks to every student in the second to eighth grade, it appears that the majority of the school’s students would be benefiting from the CEO’s donation.
While Chromebooks are mainly cloud-based devices that rely on the internet to function at their best, the computers have become increasingly popular in United States classrooms. Over the years, Google, which develops the devices’ ChromeOS operating system (an OS completely built around the Google Chrome browser), has been developing solutions and functionalities that are specifically geared for the educational sector. Coupled with the devices’ traditionally low cost and easy maintenance, Chromebooks are steadily becoming America’s computer of choice for schools. In 2017 alone, Chromebooks made up 60% of mobile device purchases by K-12 schools in the US.
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Elon Musk’s donation to fund Woodland Park Academy’s Chromebooks were announced by the school not long after it was revealed that the Musk Foundation had donated $480,000 to Flint Community Schools. The nearly half-a-million-dollar donation will be used to install ultraviolet water filtration systems for all 12 school buildings in Flint, as well as the district’s administration building. In a later Twitter post, Musk noted that he hopes he could do more to help in the future.
Elon Musk’s humanitarian activities in Flint were sparked in July after the CEO noted that he would be helping residents in the MI city get access to clean water. Musk has since remained quiet about his initiatives to aid the embattled MI city, though social media updates from Copeny, better known as Little Miss Flint, as well as residents in the area, reveal that the CEO is still helping the city.
And for my birthday I threw a huge party for #FlintKids and was able to give away over 600 bikes thanks to my friend Elon. pic.twitter.com/Z1Nieb7G7W
— Mari Copeny (@LittleMissFlint) October 12, 2018
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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