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Lucid Motors is ‘making an appearance’ during Elon Musk’s SNL episode

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Elon Musk won’t be the only thing related to the quickly-growing electric car industry to make an appearance during Saturday Night Live this evening. Tesla rival Lucid Motors will also be making an appearance during the famous television program, likely in the form of a commercial.

Musk’s appearance on SNL has been a heavy point of focus for the past week in both pop culture and the electric vehicle industry. It was announced recently that Musk would be co-hosting the May 8th show with Miley Cyrus in what is sure to be one of the most viewed episodes of the show that started nearly 46 years ago.

Elon Musk shares update on SNL appearance, says everyone is being friendly

It appears that the hype surrounding the episode may have drawn some attention from big-name companies who will purchase air time in the form of advertisements and commercials during the show. With Musk being on the air, plenty of electric vehicle enthusiasts will likely be tuned in to see what humor Musk brings with him. However, competing companies of Tesla view this as an opportunity to plant seeds in viewers’ minds, and Lucid Motors is one of them.

Lucid announced yesterday, on May 7th, that it, too, would be making an appearance on SNL. How? It seems that Lucid will advertise the Air, its first-ever sedan. With an all-electric powertrain and an already considerable number of pre-orders and support, Lucid definitely has some momentum in the sector. However, its planned and coordinated effort to derail Musk’s episode through a commercial during his hosting of SNL seems to be a continuation of some very contentious and somewhat abrupt drama between both Lucid and Tesla. The two companies, and their CEOs, have made several comments and strategic moves through the past few months that have seemed to hint toward a potential rivalry in the EV sector.

Interestingly, Lucid tested its Tri-Motor Air variant at the Laguna Seca just two days before Tesla’s Battery Day in September 2020. It was rumored to be running laps several seconds faster than the Model S Plaid ran at the same raceway nearly a year earlier. It seemed that Lucid was almost teasing Tesla and Musk to release the Plaid variants to customers, or at least release more details regarding the Plaid Powertrain to the public.

Tesla eventually obliged, but not at the Battery Day event. Tesla announced the Plaid Model S in January 2021 and plans to begin deliveries in the coming months. However, the animosity between the two companies has gone past that.

In a recent Tweet, Musk clarified what Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson’s job title was when he was employed at Tesla. It has been said in the past that he was Chief Engineer of the Model S, but Musk is not willing to give him that credibility because of what his actual job responsibility entailed. While Rawlinson did handle the Model S body engineering phase, he did not handle any issues related to powertrain, battery, software, production, or design. He left “before things got tough,” which seems to be a thorn in Musk’s side.

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Interestingly, Rawlinson’s LinkedIn tells a different story. He lists his time at Tesla from 2009 to 2012 and lists his job title as “Vice President & Chief Engineer for Model S.”

What Rawlinson’s actual job title was at Tesla remains to be confirmed. However, a 2010 press release from Tesla lists Rawlinson as “Vice President and Chief Vehicle Engineer” and says that he was “responsible for the technical execution and delivery of the Model S.

Nevertheless, the rivalry between Musk and Rawlinson rages on, and in 2021, the two CEOs are still combating for the overall domination of the EV sector. However, one thing is clear: Tesla is light years ahead. Lucid will begin delivering its Air sedan during the second half of 2021.

Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Tesla Cybertruck targets job site crews with new Tailgate Utility Track and Bed Gear Box accessory

Tesla launched a $350 tailgate track and a $985 lockable Bed Gear Box for Cybertruck.

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Tesla Cybertruck construction site

Tesla’s Cybertruck team added two more items to the Tesla Shop, targeting job site crews and owners who use the truck bed for actual work rather than just showing it off. The official Cybertruck X account posted the Tailgate Utility Track and the Bed Gear Box within minutes of each other, part of a five item batch that also included a reflective jacket, a spray paint hat and an updated reflective tee.

The Tailgate Utility Track runs $350 and turns the folded down tailgate into another mounting surface. It’s a single aluminum track with a T-slot for sliding accessories and two L-track attachment points, plus two load stops included in the box. The pitch is straightforward: strap down oversized cargo, like lumber or a cooler, that hangs off the back of the bed without it sliding out mid-drive. It bolts onto the existing tailgate and works on every Cybertruck trim.

The Bed Gear Box costs $985 and is a different kind of accessory. It’s a lockable aluminum storage box, 55.78 inches long, 19.8 inches wide and 7.79 inches tall, that mounts to the bed’s L-track rails and comes with two internal bins for smaller items. According to Tesla, at just over 57 pounds empty, it’s meant to stay in place rather than come in and out with each trip, giving owners a factory-fit alternative to loose totes for tools, recovery gear or emergency supplies. Tesla’s listing notes that Long Range and Dual Motor AWD Cybertrucks need the L-Tracks accessory installed separately before the Gear Box will mount, since L-tracks come standard only on certain configurations.

Tesla Cybertruck bed gear box accessory

Tesla Cybertruck bed gear box accessory

Both accessories lean on the idea Tesla has been building toward since Elon Musk first described the Cybertruck’s third-party attachment strategy at the 2023 shareholder meeting, when he said the truck would ship with mounting points so outside companies, and Tesla itself, could keep adding gear without redesigning the bed. That’s the same L-track backbone underneath the tailgate shield and jumpseats Tesla launched last year, and the off-road armor package that arrived through the same X account in 2025.

Owners looking to round out the rest of the L-track ecosystem, cargo dividers, MOLLE panels, bed racks and similar gear, can find a wider range of options through our Cybertruck accessories collection.

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Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years

Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.

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Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.

In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.

The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.

Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.

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This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.

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Police sergeant recounts his Neuralink journey with Elon Musk’s brain chip

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A former Vancouver police sergeant with ALS accounts his journey to become a patient for Elon Musk’s Neuralink wireless brain-computer interface technology.

“I’m texting you from my brain right now.” That was the first message Lee Marten sent after waking up from Neuralink surgery, five hours and one migraine after dozens of threads were stitched into his motor cortex.

Marten, a former Vancouver police sergeant, is one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive Neuralink’s N1 brain implant, and the 26th recipient overall. He tells his story in a first-person account published by Maclean’s.

Marten recounts how he was a healthy, athletic Vancouver police sergeant until April 2022 when symptoms of muscle twitching and balance loss, were followed by a bad fall that broke his leg. He would eventually be diagnosed with ALS in early 2025 at the age of 47. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that progressively destroys the motor neurons controlling voluntary muscle movement, eventually taking away a patient’s ability to walk, speak, swallow and breathe. There’s no cure, and most patients live two to five years after diagnosis.

He describes the devastation of the diagnosis and how he began preparing for it while connecting with other young ALS patients through a WhatsApp group called Young Guns. Through that group he learned about a Neuralink clinical trial at Toronto Western Hospital and, after a roughly seven-month vetting process (physical assessments, psychiatric evaluation, a final interview with the Neuralink team), was accepted this past April as the trial’s 26th recipient and the first Canadian ALS patient to get the N1 implant. He recounts the May surgery in detail, including the robotic system that stitched 64 threads into his brain, and describes the app, Link, translating his neural signals into cursor control, which he was using within hours of waking up.

Marten walks through what daily use looks like, including weekly “brain training” exercises, a real-time neural-activity display, charging the implant via a beanie-mounted MagSafe charger, and using the implant for emailing, texting, social media, and gaming via a “Magic Box” that connects it to other devices. He also gives brief context on brain-computer interface history and quite candid about Musk, calling him “divisive” but saying he found him “easy to admire.

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The piece closes on a heavier note, with Marten seeking to pursue medical assistance in dying as his symptoms progressed, noting that he’ll be able to communicate his final words to his family through Neuralink rather than facing a silent decline. He expresses hope the data from his case will help future ALS patients, even without a cure in his own lifetime.

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