Lifestyle
Tesla seemingly does the most Elon Musk thing ever by drawing a giant “doge” in the Giga Texas site
Elon Musk is known for many things. Apart from being a noted innovator with a penchant for attempting what is otherwise conventionally considered impossible, Musk is also known for his witty and sarcastic humor. The CEO’s humor and playful nature could be found in Tesla’s products, from fun Easter eggs on the car itself, and more recently, it seems, in the construction zone of Gigafactory Texas.
Musk has noted that he loves to use Twitter as a way to express himself, similar to how other people use their hair to show the world who they are. This was particularly evident recently as Tesla started embracing Bitcoin by investing $1.5 billion in the cryptocurrency. Musk, for his part, has focused his cryptocurrency-related tweets on Bitcoin’s more meme-worthy sibling—Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency initially created as a joke.
Giga Texas Westward expansion is no joke!
Also a very busy spectator day at the site – ALL the who’s who were there! Haha 😆 Have a great evening !
📷 @peterdog15 pic.twitter.com/fLbj3wCHFy— Gail Alfar (@GailAlfarATX) April 1, 2021
Musk has expressed his love for Dogecoin and its mascot, a Shiba Inu fondly dubbed in internet meme culture as a “Doge.” Over the past weeks, Musk has mentioned that he would be getting an actual Shiba Inu for himself. And on April Fools’ Day, Musk tweeted that SpaceX would be putting a “literal Dogecoin on the literal Moon” in a future mission. The CEO’s Dogecoin payload to a Moon mission may likely be a joke, of course, but Musk has also joked about sending a car to space in the past, and we all know how that went.
What was somewhat unexpected, however, was that Tesla seems to have hidden yet another big Doge-related Easter egg in its Gigafactory Texas site. The construction of the massive facility has been progressing at an extremely rapid pace, and every step of its development is closely monitored by Tesla community members who regularly conduct drone flyovers of the construction site. It was in one of these flyovers that Elon Musk’s latest Easter egg may have been discovered.
Large DOGE is spotted at Tesla Giga Texas this afternoon near Austin on far west side #DogecoinRise #dogecoin #technoking #NoJoke
📷 @peterdog15 pic.twitter.com/5ZaCzStIEG— Gail Alfar (@GailAlfarATX) April 2, 2021
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As could be seen in a recently captured drone footage, part of Tesla’s construction in the Giga Texas area involved clearing some new ground at the far west side of the facility. Interestingly enough, an aerial view of the site shows that the soil has been moved around in such a way that part of the area, when viewed from an angle, resembles an outline of a dog, complete with a mouth, a tail, paws, and ears. This was highlighted by a rather humorous post from the Tesla Owners Club of Austin, which noticed the apparent, massive Easter egg hidden in plain sight at the Giga Texas facility.
Granted, the massive figure could have simply been created by accident, or it may have been a playful joke by some of Giga Texas’ workers. However, such jokes or Easter eggs do fit the characteristics of some of Elon Musk’s classic humor. If any, it does provide a rather lighthearted reminder that while Giga Texas’ construction is aggressively progressing at lightning speed relative to projects like Gigafactory Nevada, Tesla is still a company with a ton of personality. And that’s precisely one of the reasons why it enjoys so much support from people across the globe.
Watch Jeff Roberts‘ recent flyover of the Gigafactory Texas site in the video below.
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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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