Meet the Dark Knight—a Brooding, Souped-up Tesla Model S

The US$104,990 three-motor 2023 Tesla Model S Plaid Edition is among the fastest cars in the world, able to reach 60 miles per hour in just two seconds. It puts out 1,020 horsepower and 1,050 pound-feet of torque.

The Plaid is so quick it leaves its drivers gasping for breath, but can the car be improved? Unplugged Performance, a tuning shop in Hawthorne, Calif., that launched in 2013, thinks it can. So was born the Dark Knight, a tweaked Model S-APEX Plaid that has been extensively reworked to better hug the pavement. It sells for approximately US$230,000, including the donor car. But the many options could make it costlier.

The powertrain stays the same, but the car gets a 19-piece carbon fibre wide body kit that allows it to wear big 21-inch, lightweight forged wheels. Airflow is improved with “bargeboard” bodywork in front of the front wheels, a technique adapted from Formula One. Also directing air is the company’s Autobahn front carbon-fibre diffuser. The car meets the world with a sinister satin-black finish, featuring more exposed carbon fibre.

The car’s centre of gravity is lowered via a kit, and there’s a three-way adjustable rear sway bar and a rear-mounted GT strut tower brace. Also part of the suspension build are a series of billet-aluminium adjustable control arms that cut weight, increase strength, and allow some fine adjustments. For those choosing optimum track performance, there are full-race coilover suspension choices available. The Dark Knight needs to stop, so there are carbon ceramic brakes all around, cooled via a ducting system.

The interior was designed in collaboration with von Holzhausen, a company created by Vicki von Holzhausen (married to Tesla chief designer Franz von Holzhausen) that specialises in vegan leather products, including handbags. The tough-wearing interior fabric is in Serrano red and made from bamboo.

The Dark Knight interior uses vegan leather from von Holzhausen.
Unplugged Performance

Unplugged also makes over the other Teslas, including the S, 3, X, Y, and will also tweak the forthcoming Cybertruck. Brendan Sangerman, who directs marketing at Unplugged, says the Dark Knight is “the ultimate daily driver sports sedan.” Asked why the electric motors are left alone, he says, “You wouldn’t want it to be any faster than it is. Instead, we match the performance of the suspension and braking to the level of performance that the car already has.”

Sangerman emphasises that the Dark Knight is a bespoke product, and that the customer has a wide choice in the interior colours and fabrics. “We want customers to be very hands-on in the process,” he said. “If you tell us you like the interior shade in a specific Rolls-Royce, we can match it. Our parts catalog is pretty extensive.”

Unplugged is located close to the Tesla Design Center in Hawthorne. Its first Model S build was shown at the SEMA Show in Las Vegas in 2014, and the company exhibited at the Tokyo Auto Salon in 2016. Unplugged began putting its vehicles to the test on race tracks, and it set some EV records. It also won the exhibition class at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in 2021.

There will always be a market for performance tuners, and Unplugged has found a niche market in making some of the world’s most exciting EVs be just that little bit more intoxicating.

“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want, but we’re betting on people, and we like those odds. The future is for everyone.”

That ad copy is from the voice-over of a July Meta Platforms META -3.38%.

spot that’s been part of a public-relations blitz to position Meta as the humanist AI company. The message was undercut by the ad’s inclusion of David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a brooding 1972 song about an impending apocalypse. But this week CEO Mark Zuckerberg left no ambiguity, publishing a 6,500-word manifesto—about 10 times the length of this newsletter—with a title that echoed the ad: “The Future is for Everyone.”

That seems to be Meta’s new tagline. In light of sinking public opinion and the company’s thousands of lawsuits from states, school districts, parents, and users, Meta’s public relations have been defensive. This push represents a return to offense, with a chance to distinguish Meta’s approach to AI from other labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX SPCX +9.65%.

“It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future.”

Zuckerberg frames what sort of future we build with AI as the central issue of our time. “We believe that delivering superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question,” he says. “This has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before.”

The flood of words belies the situation on the ground in mid-2026. Americans, at least, have a love-hate affair with social media. A November Pew Research Center poll reported that 71% of U.S. adults used Facebook, and 51% used Instagram. Worldwide, 3.6 billion people use at least one Meta app every day.

But in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in July and August, 61% of respondents said they wanted more government oversight of social media, and two-thirds supported laws to keep children under 16 years old off the platforms. When it comes to Meta in particular, in the 2026 Axios Harris 100, an annual poll about corporate reputation, Meta placed 96th out of 100. It’s only above two other social media companies, Chinese ultracheap retailer Temu, and Spirit Airlines, a defunct air carrier. Regarding ethics, Meta came in last, and it was only ahead of TikTok in trust.

The steady drip of headlines in the teen social media trials isn’t helping. Last week, Meta lost a judgment in New Mexico state court that raised their liability in that relatively small jurisdiction to nearly $1 billion dollars. On Wednesday, jury selection began for a federal case with four states suing Meta over addictive product design, and false marketing that said its platforms were safe for teenagers. In July, Meta claimed that the states are asking for a total of $1.4 trillion in damages, in addition to design changes in the apps. This is part of a multidistrict litigation, where thousands of federal trials with social media defendants are coordinated in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ district courthouse in Oakland, Calif.

There is a separate such group of thousands of cases in California state court, mostly with individual plaintiffs. The steady drip of bad headlines from the courts will continue unless Meta decides to settle en masse.

Meanwhile, in the second quarter, Meta booked “$2.40 billion of charges related to legal proceedings,” according to its quarterly filing. That may be just the beginning.

Zuckerberg spent 6,500 words getting his utopian message out, but I can sum it up in two: Trust us. The evidence is that Meta has a long way to go to win back that trust.

Meet the Dark Knight—a Brooding, Souped-up Tesla Model S

Meta is betting on a human-first AI future, but growing legal battles and declining public trust are putting Mark Zuckerberg’s vision to the test.