News
Which style of Tesla’s Solar Roof tile is right for you?
With the explicit goal of making solar panels as appealing as electric cars have become, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has unveiled the company’s newest product: solar roof tiles manufactured with durable, long lasting tempered-glass. The slogan, “Power from above, beauty from the street” captured the product and theme of the unveiling, which took place at Universal Studios in Los Angeles with the sun ready to set in the background.
The new roofs will be a collaboration between SolarCity and Tesla and can be combined with Tesla’s Powerwall 2 home battery. The tiles are hydrographically printed. Musk explained that this process that makes each one a “special snowflake.”
Throughout the product unveiling, Musk emphasized that these solar tiles, which will be integrated into the roof and invisible when viewed from the street, offer a much more attractive option as compared with currently-used solar technology. The tiles will be soon available to the public in four distinct styles. Each is architecturally significant to a home’s core design. Four distinct tile styles reinforce the importance of connecting an architectural past to the Tesla vision of a sustainable future. The “beautiful, affordable, and seamlessly integrated” glass tiles have significant historic origins and contemporary appeal.
Tuscan Glass Tile
This roof, sometimes called Italian Renaissance style, is an element of a home integrated with its setting. Consistent with Musk’s vision of sustainable solutions to a “mine-and-burn” hydrocarbon economy, landscape architecture and gardens balance Tuscan house design. The roof structure is a combination of side gable, cross gable, combined hip and gable, or hipped configuration, often with projecting wings and deep roof overhangs and eaves. The style borrows details from the entire history of Spanish architecture, with architectural elements of paired French doors, classic arches, and some use of wrought iron.
Slate Glass Tile
The most desirable roofing material for more than 1,000 years, slate has been acclaimed for its elegance and unique character. It required a craft person’s expertise and skill in hand shaping and laying it on the roof. The Tesla version likely will resemble thin tiles split into uniform thicknesses. Slate’s aesthetic appearance is due to a wide variety of rich colors and textures that are combined in nearly endless combinations. Found on virtually every class of structure, slate roofs are perhaps most often associated with institutional, ecclesiastical, and government buildings, yet slate was often used on farm and agricultural buildings as well.
-
- Credit: Tesla
Textured Glass Tile
Textured roofing tiles were used in Neolithic China as early as 10.000 B.C. and 5000 years ago in Babylon. By the end of the nineteenth century, as the use of glazed roofing tiles grew, textured tiles became among the most ornamental and distinctive roofing materials. Now featured on many historic buildings, their aesthetic qualities include many shapes, colors, patterns, and textures. Architecturally, a field of textured tiles often covers the majority of a roof’s flat surface, with decorative tiles used along the peak of the roof. In more ornamental installations, the field of tiles may have areas of patterning created by tiles of different shapes, dimensions, or color variations ranging from deep browns to pale pinks to buff or beige. Their interesting appearance has often made textured tile roofs prominent stylistic features of historic structures.
-
- Credit: Tesla
Smooth Glass Tile
Flat smooth tile offers clean lines that compliment a contemporary design with unassuming, no-frills elegance. It contains a straightforward, stripped-down geometry and a means of securing an organic bond between old, existing architecture and new buildings. This is particularly important in optically sensitive areas where contemporary architecture accentuates an important visual impression. All parts of the resultant ensemble stem from a single smooth tile source, which appears as if it grew up over the centuries. Smooth glass tiles can contribute to an eclectic conglomeration of heritage-listed façades and modern stylistic elements. Optically robust, these tiles now provide an interplay of nuances that was once typical of hand-crafted products.
Tying Architecture and Aesthetics to Energy Power Solutions
The Tesla solar roof tiles offer high efficiency solar power which will produce energy even during high temperature days. Color louver film allows cells to blend into the roof while exposing them to the sun above. With tempered glass, the material is extremely impact resistant. The solar integrates with Tesla home batteries to collect energy during the day for use in the evening once the sun goes down. Musk tweeted that “solar glass tiles can also incorporate heating elements, like rear defroster on a car, to clear roof of snow and keep generating energy.”
Tesla expects to start installing the solar roofs next summer. More durable than normal roofing tiles, the solar roofs can be tied to the updated Powerwall 2 home battery (14 kWh, $5500) which the company also showcased at the unveiling event.
The announcement of this solar innovation implies that the Tesla/ SolarCity merger will receive upcoming shareholder votes and approval.
If you’re considering solar for your home or business, we encourage you to get a solar cost estimate first, based on your monthly utility bill and location. The service is being provided by an affiliate partner and fan to Teslarati.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years
Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.
Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.
In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.
The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.
But we do need to act much faster than that if people still want to live where the beach is today. We have about 50 years or so to take action, which should be more than enough time for the space satellites to solve any heating problems. https://t.co/xhrVQALwQw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.
This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
The in-car Tesla Theater is among the most unique features available within the cars. When charging, parked, camping, or just hanging out, vehicle occupants can access a variety of streaming platforms on the large center screen, helping keep them entertained during downtime.
However, the Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms, something that owners have requested for some time.
Tesla owners recently discovered that visiting Apple TV in the vehicle browser can launch a fullscreen interface that looks and behaves like a dedicated application rather than an ordinary webpage:
Today I learned that if you go to Apple TV in the Tesla browser, it will open up an actual Apple TV app, fully functional. Not just the site.
Apparently there are more apps than just the few that show on the apps page. pic.twitter.com/os1Ypfm4JR
— Jason W (@jmwilt21) August 20, 2026
The experience drops the usual address bar and browser chrome, presenting catalogs, continue watching rows, and playback controls in the same window Tesla Theater already uses for its listed services. Independent testers soon found similar treatment for HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Disney+, and Prime Video when those sites are opened from the car browser.
This shift is a plausible early signal that Tesla is widening Theater support without a formal software note. Theater has long been a set of web views rather than native applications, so recognizing extra domains and stripping the browser frame is a small server-side change that can expand the catalog quickly.
Owners still lack permanent Theater icons for the newly recognized services, and video remains limited to Park, yet the smoother launch is a meaningful step toward a broader lounge while charging.
Tesla Theater arrived with software version 10 in September 2019. The first video services were Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu, available only while parked and originally tied to WiFi. Spotify arrived in the same era as music rather than Theater video. Disney+ joined officially in July 2021 with the 2021.24 update, giving owners another major catalog on the center screen. Twitch and TikTok later appeared among the default Theater tiles, and Tesla Tutorials remained a persistent educational tile.
Not every addition stayed put. In December 2023, a Holiday software build removed the Disney+ tile for many United States owners after a public dispute involving advertising on X. Hulu stayed visible even though Disney owned it. Visiting disneyplus.com in the browser often restored the tile, which suggested the removal was a recognition list change rather than a complete block. Owners have also reported occasional blank Theater grids after updates, usually fixed by language toggles, resets, or later firmware.
Tesla axes Disney+ from vehicles with Musk-Iger rivalry, but there’s a workaround
Code archives from 2024 listed many unused source names, including Apple TV and Prime Video, that never became official icons, which now looks like groundwork for the current fullscreen browser behavior.
Now that this hint toward an expanded Theater experience has been recognized, Tesla could follow through with these additional shortcuts as a sign that more streaming platforms are available in Teslas than ever before.
Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
