Lifestyle
How Tesla and Elon Musk subtly roasted ‘short’ sellers after Q3 Earnings
Tesla’s Elon Musk has a way of cleverly roasting those who are not on board with his company’s mission. Whether car companies are refusing to adopt any sort of EV plans for future vehicles, or hedge fund managers pump massive amounts of money into shorting Tesla’s stock, Musk always seems to come out with a witty Tweet, or a bright pair of perfectly priced short shorts, just to rub salt in the wound for good measure.
A week after his company reported its biggest quarter yet, which came paired with extending Tesla’s profitable quarter streak to five, the magical short shorts appeared once again. Those who weren’t lucky enough to receive the hilariously “short” jab at Tesla’s non-believers with the first truckload of S3XY shorts received their fulfillment earlier this week.
Priced at $69.420, which relates to Musk’s life in several ways, the S3XY short shorts were first available just before Tesla reported its fourth consecutive profitable quarter in Q2 2020.
-
- Credit: James Locke | Twitter
-
- Credit: James Locke | Twitter
If you wondered how those two childishly-funny digits relate to the Tesla CEO, they’re his favorite numbers. And coincidentally, his birthday is 69 days after 4/20, a day notorious for cannabis culture.
Somehow, when all the chips were stacked against Tesla, the automaker was able to pull through. Despite plant closures during the first half of 2020 in the U.S. and China, Tesla still was profitable. The company beat Wall Street estimates handily, which was a perfect segway into Q3, which would ultimately be Tesla’s biggest quarter to date. However, while Q2 saw more adversity than Q3, the well-timed second appearance of the S3XY short shorts complements another quarter where people said Tesla can’t and won’t. It was the exclamation point on top of its biggest three-month span in company history.
Bigger than a pair of shorts
Tesla has always been a little company with a big disadvantage. When the company decided to manufacture its first vehicle, the 2008 Roadster, it was entering a slumping automotive market that was being affected by the worst economic period since the Great Depression. Even still, the U.S. was recovering, and automotive jobs were attempting to regain some momentum as some of the car business’s biggest names were receiving government help to keep their doors open.
In arguably the worst time to start a company, Tesla was just putting its plan into place. It was battling in the worst economic time in the 21st century and attempting to completely change the tide of what was the “norm” for a car. Everyone knew that previous attempts at EVs went unsuccessful. So what was going to be different here?
-
Fast forward 12 years. Tesla is the big man on campus, even though it’s the youngest company in terms of “large-scale production” carmakers. Petrol-powered car companies are following Tesla’s lead in a desperate attempt to appear relevant. In a span of eight years, from the introduction of the Tesla Model S, legacy automakers have gone from “we’re not worried” to “full-blown panic mode,” all because people realized its better to pay for a charge than it is to pay for a tank of gas. Not only is it better for the environment, but it’s better for the wallet, too.
Tesla is proving that it is the most dominant company in the world that makes a car, and if you doubt the potential of its products, you’ll become apart of the inspiration for those short, red satin, gold-trimmed shorts.
Perfect time to wash the car with #Tesla short shorts 🤣 https://t.co/78mDTti3s7 pic.twitter.com/OtYeG8VQAS
— Sofiaan Fraval (@Sofiaan) October 28, 2020
Investors and analysts who have doubted Tesla since Day 1 are being proven wrong on what seems to be a daily basis. U.S. demand crumbling? No. European companies dominating Tesla in their own backyard? Not quite. No demand in China? Guess again.
Whether those short-shorts just so happened to become available after the company had its biggest earnings call will forever be a mystery, but the timing seems too good to be true. Whatever the case may be, people are getting their S3XY short shorts, and investors and analysts who have doubted Tesla are once again being taken for a whirl by automotive’s funniest man: Elon Reeve Musk.
-
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
-
It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
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.
-
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.
-
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
