Connect with us

Lifestyle

Tesla fan makes 3D Elon Musk tribute video, and it’s pretty darn awesome

[Credit: Andy Front/YouTube]

Published

on

A Tesla fan has created a fun, Pixar-esque Elon Musk tribute video. Featuring scenes from Musk’s early days as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to the Tesla and SpaceX CEO eventually making it to Mars, the short clip is an enjoyable watch from beginning to end.

The video was created by animator Andy Front, who uploaded the clip on his YouTube channel. According to Andy, the whole video took around one month to render completely.

The opening scenes included references to incidents of bullying that Musk experienced during his early school days, as well as his first forays into Silicon Valley (the names of Musk’s ventures were creatively changed in the video).

Challenges that Musk faced over his career were featured in the video as well, including a humorous sequence referencing the difficulties that Tesla encountered with its first car — the Tesla Roadster.

The climax of the tribute video featured a sequence depicting a BFR mission to Mars. Referencing Elon Musk’s statement that he would love to set foot on the Red Planet someday, the tribute video featured him driving around Mars on a cherry-red next-generation Tesla Roadster to the tune of “Fly Me To The Moon.” Considering Musk’s rather playful tendencies, one of which resulted in the release of The Boring Company (Not A) Flamethrower, it is not difficult to imagine the Tesla and SpaceX CEO actually driving around Mars if given a chance.

The Elon Musk tribute video ended on a humorous note, capped off by a cameo from Starman and his first-generation Tesla Roadster.

As we noted in a previous report, it is not difficult to see why Tesla has such a dedicated fanbase. Its chief executive, after all, is arguably one of the most genuine personalities in social media today. On his Twitter excursions alone, Elon Musk’s wit, self-deprecating humor, and sharpness are evident, and it has allowed him to gain 20.9 million followers to date. Other top Tesla executives are also very personable. Just recently, Tesla Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen gave a Model 3 reservation holder a pleasant surprise during the electric car’s delivery. According to the Model 3’s owner, Franz did the delivery simply because he loves seeing how people react to Tesla’s creations.

Advertisement
-
-

As we noted in a previous report, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell recently revealed that the private space company would be conducting the first orbital launches of the BFR, the ship that is expected to perform missions to Mars, as early as 2020. Suborbital spaceship tests are scheduled to begin in the first half of 2019 as well.

If the development of the BFR all goes according to plan, maybe, just maybe, Andy Front’s image of Elon Musk driving around on Mars will become a reality in the future.

Watch Andy’s Elon Musk tribute video below.

Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

Advertisement
Comments

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.

Published

on

By

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.

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.

Advertisement
-
-

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.

Continue Reading

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.

Published

on

By

tesla-zoom-meetings

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.

Advertisement
-
-
Continue Reading

Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s answer to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey got way more specific

Published

on

By

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.


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.

Advertisement
-
-
Continue Reading