News
Tesla Cybertruck sure looks similar to NASA’s Mars rover concept
Elon Musk’s “Blade Runner” Cybertruck may only be a couple days away from being unveiled to the world, but the vehicle, from its final specs and design, remains a mystery. The Tesla CEO has stated that the vehicle will not look like a traditional pickup truck, and this has been confirmed by teasers from the company and clever Easter Eggs hidden in the CYBRTRK event’s invitation and the vehicle’s stylized logo.
Considering that Musk has stated that the Tesla Cybertruck will look like an armored personnel carrier (APC) from the future, it’s difficult to not see the potential similarities between the vehicle and NASA’s Mars Concept Rover, which was unveiled back in 2017. NASA’s Mars Rover concept looks a lot like an APC from the future, and it looks very tough. It’s massive at 28 feet long, its ground clearance is no joke, and its modular structure allows it to perform a variety of tasks on the harsh environment of the Red Planet.
Quite interestingly, Tesla’s CYBRTRK seems to have some design cues that may very well be similar to that of NASA’s Mars Rover Concept. Tesla’s Easter Eggs show the Cybertruck with a smooth sloping hood, high ground clearance, and an APV-like silhouette. The similarities between the two vehicles’ design (at least based on what Tesla’s Easter Eggs have shown so far) are so notable that one can’t be faulted for speculating that the CYBRTRK may be used by Elon Musk’s companies not just as a disruptive pickup on Earth; it may also be used as a basis for a potential SpaceX Mars Rover.
This sounds very much like a statement from a sci-fi novel, but considering Musk’s habit of doing the unorthodox and implausible, a double-purpose heavy-duty vehicle may actually make sense. Musk likely prefers to have as much overlap between Tesla and SpaceX’s technologies, after all. Last September, for example, Musk stated that Teslas have the potential to work in other planets. “Well, actually, Teslas will work on Mars. You can just drive them, pretty much, because electric cars don’t need oxygen, they don’t need air. So you can just drive them around, no problem,” Musk said during SpaceX’s Starship Q&A session.
That being said, creating a crewed Mars Rover from the CYBRTRK’s platform would be incredibly challenging. For a Mars Rover project, SpaceX and Tesla would most likely focus on making the vehicle as light as possible. This is due to the Rover being part of a payload that gets sent to space. Payloads are very expensive, and thus, equipment from the CYBRTRK that’s useful on Earth will likely not be relevant for a vehicle designed for Mars. Performance is also pretty irrelevant in a crewed rover. If Tesla were to design a crewed Mars rover based on the Cybertruck, it would have to create massive modifications to the vehicle in itself, from its battery cooling systems to its equipment.
This, of course, would be a pretty challenging endeavor on both Tesla and SpaceX’s part. The difficulties of creating a vehicle capable of traversing a foreign planet from the platform of an Earth-based truck are no joke, after all. Things do get a bit easier if SpaceX ends up using the CYBRTRK platform to create an unmanned Mars Rover.
Tesla has a lot of experience in autonomous driving, and this could play very well into its advantage if Elon Musk’s private space firm decides to deploy unmanned rovers to explore the Red Planet. With this concept in mind, a tough, lightweight vehicle that’s loaded to the teeth with tech and based on the CYBRTRK platform could make sense. Tesla and SpaceX would still have to overcome massive challenges in creating a space-capable land vehicle from a pickup truck platform, but there’s no denying that the electric car maker’s expertise in designing and making EVs can very well make an affordable, reliable unmanned Mars Rover feasible.
Inasmuch as these ideas may sound implausible, it should be noted that a Mars Rover project between Tesla and SpaceX will likely not strain either company. The number of rovers needed for the initial years of a Mars mission, crewed or unmanned, will likely be very small, perhaps an order of magnitude less than the rollout of the original Tesla Roadster. Thus, both companies could innovate to the limit based on the CYBRTRK platform and it would not be a difficulty at all. The size of a CYBRTRK-based rover may not even be much of an issue, provided that SpaceX’s Starship rollout goes off without problems.
Tesla deserves a lot of credit for keeping the CYBRTRK a secret until today. Considering its futuristic cues and Elon Musk’s fond references to the vehicle being a truck worthy of a sci-fi set, the pickup truck may very well be the machine that bridges Tesla and SpaceX, at least to some degree. Even if the only parts of the Cybertruck that can be used for a Mars Rover are its chassis and powertrain, such an overlap will still be incredibly useful. Such ideas are crazy, but they may also be classic Elon Musk.
Lifestyle
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.
Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.
Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.
Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:
“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”
Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.
The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
A public service announcement. https://t.co/NYa1IpKwBX
— Jason Oppenheim (@OppenheimJason) October 4, 2026
Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.
Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.
Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.
In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”
The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”
Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner
SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.
Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.
The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.
It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”
The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.
Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.
Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.
Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.
Big news! SpaceX is introducing a new @Starlink for Communities program that lets you earn money by providing Starlink internet to your neighbors or people nearby, who can pay for access by the hour, day, week, or month.
Neighbors pay for the access they need, while the person… pic.twitter.com/DtOUs0Ekvt
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 1, 2026
The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.
A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.
Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.
Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.
Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.
The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.
The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
