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It came to you on WhatsApp. You saw it on TikTok. A cousin of yours shared it on Facebook with three exclamation points.
Elon Musk presenting the phone that is going to sink the iPhone: 789 dollars, free internet via satellite, solar charging, connection with the brain.
You forwarded it without thinking. Or worse, you were left with the desire to book it.
Bad news: that phone doesn’t exist, it never has existed and Musk has been repeating it for years. The good news, if there is any, is that you are not the only one who bite.
Millions of people have been falling into exactly the same thing for almost a decade. And that says a lot more about us than it does about Tesla.
Where did all this come from?
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
There is an image that has been making the rounds on WhatsApp, Facebook and TikTok for months.
Elon Musk comes out with a silver phone in his hand, the Tesla logo clearly visible on the back.
The owner assures that it costs 789 dollars, that it connects for free to Starlink satellites without SIM or wifi, that it is charged with sunlight and that soon you will be able to handle it with your thoughts thanks to Neuralink.
Many people share it excitedly. Some even ask where you can book.
The problem is that this phone does not exist. It has never existed. And Musk has said it several times, in public and bluntly.
But it doesn’t matter. The image continues to roll.
The story begins in 2017. A YouTube channel called Concept Creator, dedicated to fantasizing about what tech products of the future might look like, uploaded a video with an imaginary Tesla phone.
It had Android 8.0, came in three colors and sported the brand’s logo on the back. It was speculative art, just like those futuristic cars that appear in design magazines.
No one pretended it was real.
Four years later, in February 2021, an Italian designer named Antonio De Rosa went much further.
From his studio ADR Studio Design, he published a rather elaborate video that he called Tesla Model P. It showed a mobile with a metallic Cybertruck-like finish, integrated solar panel, connection to satellites and support for an invented cryptocurrency called Marscoin.
On his own website he wrote, in very large letters, that it was a tribute and that it had absolutely nothing to do with Tesla or any of the companies mentioned.
That clarification lasted as long as it takes for a video to jump off the platform.
Facebook pages cut it out, took away its context, and presented it as a real leak.
The youtubers commented on it as if it were an official announcement.
By the time someone found the original ad, the rumor had already crossed borders and translations.
The strongest surge came in September 2025.
On the 23rd, a Facebook page called Trend Fuel posted a photoshopped image of Musk supposedly presenting the device at $789.
The text was blunt: it’s official, the Tesla Pi Phone has just changed the rules of the game. The post surpassed 170,000 likes in a matter of days. Then came the videos made with artificial intelligence: Musk’s voice, his face, his gestures, all manufactured by software to announce a non-existent product.
The lighting didn’t quite match, the lips were a little out of sync with the audio, there was that plastic shine that gives away the AI. If you stopped to look, you could feel it. But almost no one stops.
What Musk has really said
Here comes the curious thing. Musk has not remained silent. He has denied the matter on several occasions, and not exactly diplomatically.
On October 18, 2024, at an event in Philadelphia, someone in the audience asked him when he was going to take out the famous phone.
His answer was recorded and picked up by several media: I hope we never have to make a phone, that’s a lot of work, the very idea makes me want to die. He added that he would only get into that mess if Apple or Google started censoring his apps or behaving like abusive owners of digital stores.
A few weeks later, on November 4, 2024, he repeated the same message on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
We’re not making a phone, he said, it’s not something we want to do unless we’re forced to.
And that’s it. There is no announcement. There is no prototype. There are no registered patents or approvals in regulatory bodies.
The strategic plan that Tesla published in 2025 does not mention smartphones on any of its pages. Neither do the annual reports that the company presents to its shareholders.
If there were a working phone, there would be a huge documentary trail. There are none.
The promises that deflate when you look at them closely
It is worth reviewing the characteristics attributed to the alleged device. Some have a small real base stretched to the point of absurdity.
Others are pure fantasy.
The connection to Starlink without SIM or wifi sounds groundbreaking, but the reality is much more modest.
Since July 23, 2025, SpaceX and T-Mobile launched a service that allows normal smartphones to send text messages via satellite in areas without coverage. Apple has been offering something similar since 2022 for emergencies.
It works with any compatible modern mobile phone and goes at very low speeds: it is used to ask for help, not to watch Netflix in the middle of the Sahara.
No special Tesla hardware is needed.
Integrating with Neuralink is where the story gets furthest from reality. Neuralink is a company that develops brain-computer interfaces and in 2024 began implanting chips in patients with severe paralysis.
The intention is strictly medical: to help people with serious injuries regain basic functions such as moving a cursor or controlling a robotic arm. The trials require brain surgery, are supervised by the FDA, and belong to the field of experimental medicine.
There is not even a sketch of a product for the general public, and paying for coffee or unlocking doors with your mind is science fiction today.
Solar charging has its physical logic, but numbers do not accompany enthusiasm.
A panel the size of a mobile phone back cover, under ideal conditions, produces one or two watts of energy.
That is enough to extend the standby mode for a few hours, not to power a device for daily use. Never plugging it in is advertising, not engineering.
Mining cryptocurrencies from your mobile phone is directly impossible without frying the device. The processors used for mining consume brutal amounts of power and generate so much heat that any phone would melt in a few hours. And driving a Tesla car from your phone is already done, for free, with the official application that has existed since 2018 and can be downloaded on any iPhone or Android.
Why we snack again and again
This is where the case becomes more interesting than the ghost phone itself. The important question is not whether it exists, but why so many reasonable people share these stories for almost a decade without stopping to check them.
The first reason is emotional. Tesla and Musk have generated enormous and well-founded expectations.
They have made very powerful electric cars, rockets that return to Earth and land on their own, humanoid robots, tunnels dug by autonomous machines. When someone blurts out that Musk is now going to release a phone that reinvents the category, it fits perfectly into the mental image we already had.
It is hard to believe it because we already expect impossible things from him.
The second reason is visual. Generative artificial intelligence tools have made it so cheap to create believable images and videos that anyone with a computer and a few hours to spare can make a convincing montage.
The human brain is not prepared to distrust what it sees, and even less so when what it sees confirms what it already wanted to believe.
The third reason is in the algorithms. Social media rewards content that elicits strong emotional reactions.
Surprise, emotion and indignation travel very quickly.
Quiet verification, no. A post saying that Tesla just unveiled the phone of the future instantly generates adrenaline.
The article that explains that it is a lie arrives days late, does not excite anyone and is only read by a handful of people.
The fourth reason is economic. Behind many of these deceptions there is a fairly clear business.
The pages that publish them bill with the advertising that surrounds the viral content. Websites that offer to pre-order the device collect emails for spam lists or, in the worst cases, install malicious software on the device of those who try to remove theirs. It is not only a cultural phenomenon.
It’s a business model that works.
The mirror that prefers not to look at itself
The Tesla Phone works as a mirror of something wider and quite uncomfortable. We live in a time when the speed at which information circulates has left far behind our ability to digest it calmly. It is not a question of intelligence. Educated, informed and discerning people share these stories every day, because the system is designed to make that happen.
Fact-checkers such as Snopes, PolitiFact, and Newtral have been debunking the Tesla Phone over and over again for years.
Their articles are there, well done, and they are met with a half-minute search. But they add up to a minuscule portion of the views that the original fake videos receive. Truth competes on unequal terms against emotion.
The next time a spectacular technological news arrives, before passing it on to another chat it is worth asking yourself three basic questions.
If the product were real, would the big specialized media have told about it? Is there an official trace, a patent, a company statement, a regulatory registration? Has the protagonist himself said anything on his verified channels?
In the case of the Tesla Phone, all three answers are no. And they have been no since 2017.
The telephone does not exist. What does exist, and this gives us more to think about, is our ability to construct realities that we like more than the real one, and to forward them on WhatsApp before stopping to think for two seconds.
In short, Tesla’s supposed phone, known as the Tesla Pi or Model Pi, doesn’t exist.
The rumor was born in 2017 with an artistic concept on YouTube and resurfaces every year with new impossible features: free connection to Starlink, integration with Neuralink, solar charging, cryptocurrency mining.
Musk has denied this several times. The case shows how artificial intelligence, algorithms and our own desire to believe manufacture fake news that we forward without thinking.
References
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De Rosa, A. (2021). Model P: No ordinary phone. ADR Studio Design. https://tesla.adrstudiodesign.com/
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TeslaNorth. (2021, February 3). Tesla Model Pi smartphone concept imagined by designer. https://teslanorth.com/2021/02/03/tesla-model-pi-smartphone-concept-imagined-by-designer-video/
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