Brandon Dalaly, a Tesla owner, has a unique way of unlocking his car: with his hand. Or rather, with the specially made chip that was implanted in his hand eleven days ago. I spoke with him about his new implant and he told me that this was actually his second one.
The first thing I wanted to know was how bad it hurt. If you watch this video, you’ll probably wince in imaginary pain as I did. Brandon explained that this was his second chip. When he received his first one, he did not use any anesthesia or anything to numb it.
“The first one was a little bit smaller so it wasn’t as intense as shoving that giant rod into my hand. The first one came preloaded into a larger syringe. They pushed the syringe in and they popped in the chip similar to how they would microchip a dog.”
The first chip implant burned and was sore for about a month. However, for the second one which is what is used to unlock his Tesla, his hand was anesthetized with lidocaine. Brandon said a four-gauge needle was used.
The chips, he explained, are coated in biocompatible substances such as biopolymer. His other one is a bioglass. Once implanted, the body encapsulates the chip with its own tissue.
Why Two Chips?
I was curious as to why Brandon had two chip implants. He explained that they do completely different things. The chips are used for a variety of purposes such as access control, storing data, lighting up under your skin, or storing cryptocurrencies. Brandon is actually beta testing the chip he uses to unlock his Tesla.
The chip that Brandon uses to unlock his Tesla is the VivoKey Apex which is a contactless NFC secure element chip.
“I’m in a beta group of around 100 people and this one can do secure transactions and java card applets. The company that put this together literally has its own app store where you can wirelessly install apps into your body with these chips. And one of the apps just happened to be a Tesla key card. So that was the first app I installed on it because I have a Tesla and now I use that as my key when my Bluetooth key fails or I don’t have my key card. You just use your hand.”
The first chip, Brandon explained, is the key to his home and stores his portfolio, his contact card, medical information, Covid vaccination card, and similar items. The chip can be scanned with any cell phone which then opens a portal you can access the information.
“The whole idea was that I would have my house key in my left hand and my car key in my right hand. And then what’s really cool is when it’s approved, they can wirelessly activate the new chip I just got to do credit card transactions. I can link a credit card to it and I can use it anywhere where there are tap-to-pay terminals.”
The Obvious Concern: accidently being close to something that would scan the chip and use it.
One concern I had was what if the chip was accidently used or accessed. Or, worst case scenario, hacked? For example, would a nearby credit card machine accidently scan your chip and access your money? Brandon explained that the chip had to be very close for the machine to read it.
“You have to be within a few millimeters of the thing and realistically, hopefully, you’re not just walking through credit card terminals and brushing your hands against them during mid transactions.”
“It’s a very short read range. It’s no different from your phone if you use Apple Pay. It’s like that but it’s built in your hand.”
Will Brandon get more chips?
Could this be the tech version of tattoo addictions? I asked Brandon if he had plans for getting any more chips in the future. Brandon works in tech and `is always trying to be on the cutting edge of everything.
“For me, it’s something that made sense at the time. It’s kind of like a fun party trick. When you can one of my chips with your phone, it glows green underneath your skin.”
There is another chip but it’s not yet available in the U.S. just yet. This one measures your body temperature. The capsule is installed in your chest and you can scan it with your phone and take your temperature.
“We’re at the dawn of this technology and it’s a very niche product. And there’s been a lot of pushback. People thought that Bill Gates was putting tracking chips in the Covid vaccine. It fuels a lot of conspiracy theories.”
“It’s funny because these chips can’t track anything. You would need an external power supply to be tracked anywhere. And their phones are tracking them everywhere they go anyway. If you go to your Google location history, it shows you step-by-step where you’ve been.”
“And there’s the religious people who have sent me a bunch of weird comments on Facebook about the mark of the beast on the video of my first chip installation. There’s something in the Book of Revelation that talks about this mark in your hand or forehead that shows your allegiance to Satan or something like that. I just don’t want to have to worry about forgetting my car keys. I’m not over here worshiping Satan.”
Cost of getting the Tesla key card chip implanted.
Credit: Brandon Dalaly
If you were to guess how much this would cost, you might be shocked at how wrong you may be. Unless you guessed $400.
“It’s not as bad as people think. Since I was a beta tester, I got the chip for $300 and then my installer charged me just $100 to put it in. To him, it was the same as a subdermal piercing. It’s the same method but he was sticking in something different.”
Brandon’s installer has been a professional piercer for over 15 years. What do you think? Would you consider having a chip installed in your hand to unlock your Tesla or smart car?
Disclaimer: Johnna is long Tesla.
Your feedback is important. If you have any comments, concerns, or see a typo, you can email me at johnna@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @JohnnaCrider1
Elon Musk
Elon Musk drops a surprise update on Boring Company’s next big dig
Musk says Boring Company could shrink the Austin to San Antonio drive to just minutes.
Elon Musk says The Boring Company is working on what he called “a simple, precursor Hyperloop” tunnel connecting Austin and San Antonio, targeting speeds above 200 mph and cutting a drive that can take up to two and a half hours down to a consistent under 30 minutes. Musk posted the idea on X Sunday, in a reply to a repost of an AI generated video imagining a science fiction future with human colonies on other worlds, which he shared with the line “This is the future we shall bring into being.”
This is the future we shall bring into being pic.twitter.com/8aD0w8MDVc
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 20, 2026
The Boring Company’s own account picked up the idea in the same thread, adding a detail about how the trip would actually work: “Because Loop/Hyperloop is express (i.e. no intermediate stops), one could travel from an Austin parking lot to a favorite San Antonio restaurant in about 30 minutes. As long as they both have Loop stations.” That framing ties the proposed intercity link to the same station model the company already runs in Las Vegas, where riders enter the tunnel network through small, garage style stops rather than one central terminal.
This is not the company’s first run at the Austin to San Antonio corridor. Boring Company floated tunnels between the two cities as far back as 2021, and later competed for a separate San Antonio Loop project tied to the airport before that specific bid stalled. Pitches for tunnels in Chicago, Los Angeles, and a New York to Washington corridor have followed a similar pattern of big announcement without a shovel in the ground.
What is different this time is the balance sheet, especially since The Boring Company closed a 3 billion dollar funding round led by investors in the United Arab Emirates earlier this month at a valuation near 23 billion dollars, giving the tunneling company more capital to chase speculative projects than it had during its earlier Texas pitches. The company is also mid-build on two other intercity systems it has actually broken ground on, inc;luding a Nashville tunnel linking downtown to the airport, where a second boring machine finished commissioning in June, and its Las Vegas network, where the station count keeps climbing on paper faster than tunnels get dug.
That gap between announcement and execution is the reason to treat Sunday’s post as an opening bid rather than a project. A tunnel spanning roughly 80 miles between two metro areas, running at speeds Boring Company has not demonstrated over any real distance, would dwarf anything the company has built. For now, the Austin to San Antonio Hyperloop exists as a caption under an AI generated space video.
Elon Musk
Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production
Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.
Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.
Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.
Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.
Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s next Uranium in Uranus merch is Boring Company’s weirdest tease yet
Elon Musk teased a glowing new Boring Company merch idea, complete with a Geiger counter.
Elon Musk teased the next piece of Boring Company merchandise on X Saturday, and it is exactly as unserious as fans of the company’s product history have come to expect. “The next @boringcompany merch will put Uranium in Uranus,” Musk wrote in a thread posted early Saturday morning. He followed up by explaining that the item would glow in the dark, “because otherwise how could you find it,” and that a Geiger counter would be sold separately as “an optional strap-on.”
Musk closed the thread with a line that doubles as a mission statement for the tunneling company’s merchandise arm: “It’s not easy coming up with something that is both outrageously unsellable and yet extremely popular.”
The Boring Company has built a small but consistent side business out of novelty items that start as jokes and end up selling out. The company’s Not-a-Flamethrower raised roughly $10 million in a few days back in 2018, moving all 20,000 units it produced. Its Burnt Hair perfume, priced around $100 a bottle, sold out fast enough that scalpers were flipping units on eBay for ten times the retail price. Boring Bricks, made from tunneling spoil, followed the same playbook of teasing a product on X months before it became real.
Musk has not said what the actual item will be, only that it involves uranium and glows in the dark. Given the pattern, that vagueness is probably intentional. Past merch announcements have started as one-line jokes and taken weeks or months to turn into an actual product listing on the company’s site, and there is no guarantee this one follows through at all.
The timing lines up with a period of real momentum for the Boring Company outside of the joke merchandise. The company said last week it plans to double the number of operational stations on its Vegas Loop by the end of the year, a target tied to a hiring push for drivers and operations managers. Prufrock-5, one of the company’s tunnel boring machines, also just wrapped a test tunnel in Bastrop, Texas, and is expected to relaunch on its next assignment in November.
Whether the uranium joke turns into an actual product remains to be seen. Musk’s post did not include a price, a shipping date, or even a name for the item, which has historically meant a Boring Company website page goes up quietly, password protected, sometime before an announcement.
Elon Musk drops a surprise update on Boring Company’s next big dig
Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production
