Lifestyle
Tesla workers enjoy free concert by award-winning musician as thanks for hard work
Tesla’s Fremont factory recently hosted a special event where 12-time Grammy Award-winning musician, Jack White, held a free concert to show his appreciation for the company and its workers. The event, which appeared to have been a blast, provided Tesla’s employees with some much-needed downtime as the company’s aggressive push towards profitability this third quarter continues.
It is no secret that Tesla’s workers work hard; likely harder than employees at other automakers. Tesla is not a conventional car company, particularly since Elon Musk’s business sense was honed in Silicon Valley, which features an environment where extended hours and sleepless nights are the norm. Silicon Valley is known for its “work hard, play hard” culture, and Tesla is no different.
Jeremy Hollman, a former SpaceX test engineer, noted in a statement to WIRED, that once, Elon Musk had the factory floor set up like a full-blown carnival for a party. Musk also rented out an entire soccer stadium in 2016 for what the company billed as a simple “Tesla Party.” The event was nothing but understated, as it included free food, drinks, foosball, and live aerial acrobatics. Addressing Tesla’s employees then, Musk stated that the party was an act of gratitude for the employees’ hard work.
Jack White noted in several posts on Twitter that the thought of performing a free concert for Tesla’s workers has been in his mind for a few years now. White also stated that he is a huge supporter of “everything Tesla has been doing since day one.” The musician posted a short video featuring the highlights of his visit to the Fremont factory, including a test drive on the Model 3 Performance with Tesla Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen. Images uploaded on Tesla’s official Twitter account also show that White was given a tour of the factory. Social media posts from employees and Tesla executives about the event were shared late Friday as well, with Elon Musk and Franz von Holzhausen personally thanking White on Twitter for the free concert.
Thanks for visiting, Jack! 🤘 @thirdmanrecords pic.twitter.com/XprEyU8RvQ
— Tesla (@Tesla) August 18, 2018
Jack White is a decorated singer and songwriter who has been active since 1987. Best known as the lead singer and guitarist of The White Stripes, White had enjoyed critical and commercial success for his work in the industry. He currently has 12 Grammy Awards, and three of his albums hit the No. 1 spot in Billboard charts. Back in 2010, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked White as No. 70 in its list of “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time,” beating out popular names such as Kurt Cobain (No. 73) and Bruce Springsteen (No. 93). Rolling Stone editor David Fricke ranked White as No. 17 on his list in 2011.
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https://twitter.com/thirdmanrecords/status/1030604842115493902
White is also known for his philanthropy work. Back in 2009, he donated nearly $170,000 for the renovation of the baseball diamond in southwest Detroit’s Clark Park. In 2013, the Detroit Masonic Temple found itself on the verge of a foreclosure after it was revealed that it owed $142,000 in back taxes — an amount that White paid in full. The National Recording Preservation Foundation also received an inaugural gift of $200,000 from White for the restoration and preservation of deteriorating sound recordings. White also joined Nashville’s Gender Equality Council in 2016.
Watch excerpts of Jack White’s visit and free concert to Tesla’s Fremont factory in the video below.
https://twitter.com/thirdmanrecords/status/1030661273543819266
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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