Lifestyle
Elon Musk to discuss Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and more on 80-minute Recode podcast
On Friday, November 2, 2018, Elon Musk would be featured in an 80-minute Recode Decode podcast, hosted by famed tech journalist Kara Swisher. In a series of tweets on Thursday, Swisher provided some teasers of the upcoming episode, stating that she and Musk would be talking about several topics, including Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, the Saudis, Artificial Intelligence, Twitter regrets, and more.
Needless to say, this upcoming podcast would most certainly be filled with notable tidbits and updates on Elon Musk’s numerous ventures. Lightheartedly referencing Musk’s controversial appearance in the Joe Rogan Experience podcast earlier this year, Swisher assured her followers that yes, Elon Musk would be talking about a lot of topics, and no, there would be no alcohol or cannabis involved. A follow-up post further teased that the upcoming podcast would feature a “more rested Elon Musk,” which bodes well for the quality of the 80-minute session.
Podcast secured. (@elonmusk approved of this joke — well, he laughed at least) pic.twitter.com/d7yOY3Z5AE
— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) November 1, 2018
If any, followers of Elon Musk’s several ventures would likely get more notable updates and tidbits of information from Swisher’s upcoming Recode Decode episode than they did in Musk’s 2-hour-plus interview with Joe Rogan last September. Between the two podcast hosts, after all, Kara Swisher’s knowledge in tech and her background on Musk’s projects is incomparable with Joe Rogan’s. During Musk’s sessions with Rogan, for one, there were notable periods when Musk took some time explaining the basics of his work and his company’s products to the MMA enthusiast and comedian. Such instances would likely not happen in the upcoming Recode Decode episode.
Recode, particularly Swisher, and Elon Musk have a rather long history together. The noted tech journalist, after all, has written about Elon Musk in the past. In her opinion column in the New York Times this past August, for example, Swisher gave her take on Elon Musk’s behavior on Twitter and their repercussions, dubbing the serial tech entrepreneur as the “Id” of tech. Swisher and fellow Recode founder Walter Mossberg have also interviewed Musk on numerous occasions, featuring him on the D11 conference back in 2013 and in the 2016 Code Conference.
Oh hai — a more rested @elonmusk talks Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company, Saudis, AI, tweet regrets, he has a few, and more on 80-min Recode Decode podcast coming Friday pic.twitter.com/54Ya8AP8IV
— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) November 1, 2018
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Elon Musk’s year has been rife with notable ups and equally grave downs. This year included milestones such as the Falcon Heavy’s inaugural flight as well as Tesla’s transition into a profitable electric car company (it surprised Wall Street by posting $6.8 billion in revenue and beating earnings estimates with a GAAP profit of $312 million), while The Boring Company, a startup founded as a result of a pun on Twitter, won a high-profile bid for the upcoming Chicago-O’Hare high-speed transport line. That said, Musk has also attracted a notable amount of controversy, including an SEC lawsuit over his “funding secured” tweet last August that cost him and Tesla a total of $40 million as part of a settlement, and a series of Twitter altercations with the media that negatively affected Tesla stock.
Elon Musk’s podcast with Kara Swisher tomorrow could be accessed here (for Apple devices).
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.
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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.
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.
Tesla unlocks in-car web conferencing to extend Google Meet, Teams and beyond
Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features
