Lifestyle
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell talks space, life and Elon Musk
Chief Operating Officer and SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell recently gave a revealing and fascinating interview with Marie Claire. A historically fashion-focused media outlet, Marie Claire has recently taken to exploring a much broader subset of topics, with a particular affinity towards content that might help empower women both young and old.
Gwynne Shotwell may well be one of the best stories of success for women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields over the last decade. Engineering, particularly aerospace engineering, has a rather shadowy history of diversity and inclusion, even to this day. Regardless, Elon Musk has demonstrated no discriminatory tendencies whatsoever throughout his storied history. According to Shotwell, Space and Tesla CEO Elon Musk called Shotwell and asked her to apply for a position as Vice President of Business Development after a conversation that lasted a few minutes, following a tour of SpaceX’s facilities. She was immediately hired and the rest is history. Musk and Shotwell have truly become a force to be reckoned with in the launch industry, and Shotwell has developed a reputation as an unbelievably effective salesperson, whom Musk regularly praises.
Shotwell and Musk played critical roles in early talks with NASA that ultimately translated into a ~$2 billion commercial resupply services (CRS) contract awarded for delivery of cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, and helped bring SpaceX back from the brink of bankruptcy in 2008. Promoted to Chief Operating Officer and President soon after, Shotwell has since helped secure SpaceX’s backlog of more than $7 billion worth of launches.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BVarZZSgfIP/?taken-by=elonmusk
In light of SpaceX’s rapidly accelerating launch cadence, the most interesting information to come out of Marie Claire’s interview with the COO might be related to the workload its employees face. SpaceX has long been almost mythologized as a place where employees might be expected to regularly work 60-80 hour weeks if they expect to keep their jobs. While the company has fought to combat those rumors, it is undeniable that at least a minority in the company have been required to work extremely trying hours in certain periods of frenetic activity. However, Shotwell directly addressed those concerns, personally admitting that requiring 70-80 hour work weeks was unsustainable in the long run for SpaceX employees. Further, stepping well out of line with the traditional engineer work ethic, she stated that the company’s employees were encouraged to “focus on simplifying their jobs and making the task easier instead of putting their heads down and being a hero”. Encouraging a responsive, intelligent work ethic for all employees is truly exceptional throughout almost all engineering-focused companies.
“I have learned over my 15 years of working with him to not bet against him and not question whether something can be done”
While she has always acted as a sort of temper to Musk’s extraordinary willingness to accept risks in the pursuit of non-traditional solutions or goals, she noted that, “I have learned over my 15 years of working with him to not bet against him and not question whether something can be done”. Sober voices will be necessary along SpaceX’s path to Mars, and the Musk-Shotwell duo encourage significant optimism that SpaceX will eventually succeed. Musk could not have found a more perfect person to help lead SpaceX, and Shotwell will almost certainly continue to work miracles as she works to ensure that SpaceX achieves its lofty ambitions.
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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.
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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.
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![Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/tesla-optimus-gen3-diner-80x80.jpg)
