Alumni’s YouTube Channel Boosts Business, Catches Elon Musk’s Eye
Cory Steuben (’10, ME) had never posted anything on YouTube when he pitched the idea of starting a channel for Munro and Associates in March 2020.
Since then, the channel has garnered a lot of attention and grown to about 217,000 subscribers and more than 20 million views. One of the biggest people to notice the channel is SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who invited Steuben and the show’s host to the SpaceX headquarters in Texas for an on-camera interview.
Cory Steuben (‘10 ME)
Munro and Associates President
“It has grown to be a crazy monster and generates a lot of money for us,” said Steuben, President of Munro and Associates. “We’re making thousands a day in ad revenue.”
The channel, “Munro Live,” features the company’s Chief Executive Officer Sandy Munro providing his insight and analysis on the teardown of a 2020 Tesla Model Y and a 2021 Model 3, other electric vehicle discussions and interviews with small, electric vehicle CEOs. Munro and Steuben also embarked on an 8,000-mile road trip to California in a 2021 Tesla Model 3 in January.
Steuben films, produces and edits the episodes, along with two other Kettering alumni, Tylor Schlink (’14, ME) and Nicholas Szczotka (’19, ME). Outside of purchasing the cars and labor, they try to keep the costs of producing videos low. Steuben uses an iPhone 11 to shoot the videos and LumaFusion app to edit the videos.
“I edited the entire Elon interview on the phone in a moving car and AirDropped it,” Steuben said. “There’s no editing room.”
He proposed the channel after the company lost its biggest client when the pandemic hit. Munro was slated to be interviewed for Autoline Detroit and Bloomberg prior to the channel going live, but Steuben asked that they promote their upcoming channel and that they planned to tear down a Tesla Model Y, which they did. Then, Teslarati.com mentioned what they were doing.
They released a new video every day for the first two weeks. By June 2020, the channel had a mention in a Wall Street Journal column.
And now, Steuben credits the channel with saving the company.
“We would not have made it through the pandemic,” he said.
Based in Auburn Hills, Mich., Munro and Associates provide a variety of engineering services from benchmarking to product development. The company’s work primarily comes from repeat business of satisfied customers, Steuben said.
Meeting Elon Musk
It was in January while Steuben and Munro were driving to California that they were contacted by a representative for Elon Musk and invited them to meet him in Brownsville, Texas. They were in Eugene, Oregon, and according to their GPS, it would take 42 hours and 17 charging stations to get there.
“We barely made it,” Steuben said. “We left Monday at noon and got there at 7 a.m., Friday morning and we drove through the nights.”
Musk’s schedule was two hours behind when they arrived, so they were given a tour of the SpaceX facilities until they could meet with Musk. Following the interview, they also got to observe Musk in his next meeting.
“He’s humble and stoic, and if I had to add more, intelligent and calculated,” Steuben said about Musk. “He’s very calculated. He chooses his words wisely, but stoic; he doesn’t show a lot of emotion, positive or negative.”
Steuben said he was impressed with the interaction they had with Musk.
“Here he is the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, and he took an hour of his day at 7 p.m. Friday and focused on Sandy and me,” Steuben said. “He didn’t check a phone and didn’t look disinterested. He gave us his full, undivided attention.”
The video of Munro’s interview with Musk has been viewed more than 2 million times, but Steuben still has big plans for the channel, as they’ve purchased equipment that will enable them to produce live streams, too. They also plan to tear down other electric vehicles, including a 2021 Rivian R1T.
He also hopes to grow Munro and Associates.
“The channel is one thing, but I want to make sure Munro and Associates is a place everyone wants to work because it’s one of the best places to work in Southeast Michigan,” he said. “I want to make it a destination for Kettering grads, not just a place where they work for a few years and hop onto bigger and better places.”
Growing with the company was something Steuben was able to do. He started at Munro and Associates during his Co-op at Kettering in 2005 and continued working there when he graduated in 2010. He was named President in January 2020.
“I see a massive value in the Co-op program because I still use those same principles today even though I was promoted to President,” he said.
Elon Musk says Tesla Bot prototype will be ready next year. Can we believe him?
CNET
Elon Musk says he’ll have a humanoid robot to show off next year, but the iconoclastic entrepreneur has a mixed record when it comes to promises and predictions. It’s worth revisiting them before you plan your next moving day around the Tesla Bot’s debut.
Last week at Tesla’s AI day event, Musk announced the auto company would have a prototype ready as soon as next year to help with tasks that are boring, repetitive or dangerous. As proof of concept, Musk shared a PowerPoint and welcomed a dancer in a Tesla Bot bodysuit on stage. It was all a bit reminiscent of the failed Cybertruck armor glass demonstration that resulted in two broken windows on stage.
Now playing: Watch this: Tesla’s building a robot
The promise of a domestic robot is also a bit hard to swallow when Tesla is debuting in its cars a “full self-driving” option which, as my CNET colleague Brian Cooley argues, doesn’t deliver on its name. Even Musk himself admitted Monday that the current beta “is actually not great.”
It’s almost too easy to be skeptical of Musk’s promises. He’s burned us so many times in the past. But that’s also a bit of a glass-half-empty outlook, no? This is the same man who has arguably revolutionized at least two industries – automotive and space launch – in the past decade while also making headway on others, like broadband internet access with SpaceX’s Starlink service.
The problem is Musk promises not just revolutions, but far more transcendent accomplishments, like moving millions to Mars or merging humans with AI. So how do you evaluate what to believe from a man who, as a result of having superhuman goals, delivers both revolution and disappointment at the same time?
Let’s look back at Musk’s track record for some insight.
Sleeping through the commute
Tesla
In 2014, Musk famously predicted that self-driving systems would be advanced enough by 2020 that “you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination.”
Seven years later, Tesla has clearly made progress toward that goal, but what it calls full self-driving is still really advanced driver assistance, and falling asleep on the way to work is still a very bad (and illegal) idea. The debate over exactly how much autonomy Tesla currently offers was on display earlier this year when Musk promised full Level 5 autonomy by the end of 2021, but a company engineer walked back the pledge in communications with regulators less than three months later. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
By the way, this is all happening after the close of 2020, which was the deadline Musk set in 2019 for Tesla to have a million robotaxis on the road. At the time, Musk noted that he’s often not on time with such pledges but did promise that Tesla would get it done. Now we’re left to wonder about the odds of seeing Tesla Bots in homes before fleets of robotaxis hit the road.
Now playing: Watch this: Musk predicts 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road next…
Still, there’s reason to believe Tesla and Musk will get it done eventually. The company has reached one audacious milestone, first verbalized by Musk in 2015, which was that the automaker could be worth as much as Apple (over $700 billion at the time) by the year 2025.
Earlier this year, Tesla’s market value passed $800 billion for the first time. Meanwhile, Apple is worth over $2 trillion, but that’s still a remarkable gain from Tesla’s roughly $25 billion valuation in 2015.
Moving to Mars
Musk’s other major success has been with SpaceX, the rocket company he founded in 2002 to work on his magnum opus: making humanity a multiplanetary species by sending as many of us as possible to pioneer life on Mars. Back then, when people weren’t paying nearly as much attention to Musk’s predictions, he hoped to make it to the red planet by 2010.
Instead, it took six years for SpaceX to make it to orbit for the first time, in 2008. Since then, the company has pioneered and perfected the practice of landing and reusing rockets, launched the most powerful rocket in the world today in the Falcon Heavy, and transported astronauts to the International Space Station in the first new crew vehicle developed in decades.
NASA
While all this was underway, SpaceX also initiated a massive satellite broadband service, called Starlink, that’s already signed up 100,000 customers. The company has so come to dominate the space industry that when NASA went to award contracts for the human landing system that’ll send astronauts back to the lunar surface this decade, SpaceX was the sole awardee.
It’s a remarkable track record, and yet it doesn’t live up to Musk’s own hype.
His timeline for getting to Mars has been pushed back repeatedly, to 2018, then 2022, 2024… For now, the focus is temporarily on getting Artemis astronauts to the moon, something then-President Donald Trump promised NASA would do by 2024. NASA hasn’t backed off that target under the Biden administration, despite the majority of observers often finding it to be a laughable goal given the glacial pace of development for the agency’s next-generation Space Launch System.
But with Musk and SpaceX officially in the mix and developing Starship for missions to the moon, the rhetoric has changed a bit, led by the man himself. As early as 2019, Musk was predicting Starship could send astronauts to the moon by 2023, a goal he’s recently reiterated.
Probably sooner — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 15, 2021
Meanwhile, SpaceX has already missed an “aspirational” goal of sending Starship on its first orbital flight in July. Though Musk says the huge vehicle is nearly ready to fly, it still faces months of regulatory hurdles that make a first trip to space this year seem less likely.
So, just as with Tesla, don’t bet against SpaceX getting where it plans to go, but certainly don’t assume that’ll happen as soon as Musk would like.
Caught in the hyperloop
With Musk’s two main ventures described above, he seems to simply be impatient or may even use those impossible timelines to motivate employees while simultaneously keeping the public interested. Either way, results trail the hype (even if at a distance) fairly consistently.
But with Musk’s side projects, the results have been more uneven.
Now playing: Watch this: Road testing the Boring Company Loop under Las Vegas
Take hyperloop, the super-fast monorail-type transport in a vacuum tube that Musk open-sourced in a white paper in 2013. He acknowledged at the time that he didn’t have the bandwidth to devote to developing the technology, but he continued to work on the project on the side, hosting pod development competitions, starting the Boring Company to improve tunnel construction and undertaking a couple of demonstration projects, notably in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, under the rebranded name Loop.
Musk pitched Loop as a way to skip traffic via a network of high-speed pods and skates underground that can move passengers and vehicles at up to twice the surface freeway speed limit.
So far though, the pilot projects in Las Vegas and near SpaceX headquarters in California are nothing more than tiny tunnels where human drivers behind the wheels of Teslas ferry passengers across short distances at relatively low speeds. Still waiting for the revolution on this one.
Musk inside your head
Musk is also behind schedule to deliver what’s been promised with another of his smaller efforts, Neuralink. The long-term vision here is a truly futuristic mind merge between individual human brains and artificial intelligence via brain-computer interfaces. Musk sees it as a way for humanity to keep up with the development of powerful general AI, which he’s long deemed an existential threat.
CNET
In the short term, the plan is to develop an assistive technology for people with conditions like paralysis.
In 2019 Musk said: “We hope to have this, aspirationally, in a human patient by the end of this year. So it’s not far.”
But so far the news out of Neuralink has been a little uneven. A few media events have featured pigs with brain implants and a monkey that Neuralink said could control a game of Pong via wireless brain implants. Human trials, scientific publications and other data have been slow to emerge, however. An earlier goal of bringing Neuralink to market in 2021 certainly doesn’t seem to be happening.
Now playing: Watch this: Neuralink’s latest monkey brain chip demo explained
So what to take from all this? A couple of things are clear: Musk can’t help but project into the future on almost any subject that lands on his radar, and his timelines can’t be trusted. If Elon Musk promises to deliver your pizza in 30 minutes, go out for dinner and look forward to having that pizza sometime next week.
Also, remember that this guy spends a lot of nights sleeping in Tesla facilities or in a tiny home at the Starship development campus. He’s got quite a grasp of what’s possible in the automotive and space domains, but when he’s chiming in on almost any other topic, whether it’s Dogecoin or even humanoid robots, maybe consider some healthy skepticism.
Boston Dynamics Atlas parkour failures. pic.twitter.com/BaY4Sx9R74 — MachinePix (@MachinePix) August 17, 2021
Musk may like to consider Tesla a robotics company, but outfits like Boston Dynamics probably have something to say about engineering for the multiple degrees of freedom a humanoid form suggests. No one has ever seen a Model III jump, dance or do a back flip, after all.
I reached out to Musk for comment via Tesla and SpaceX but did not hear back.
So will we see Tesla Bot next year? Maybe. But something tells me Musk might get distracted by other commitments.
Elon Musk’s humanoid robot is just another Tesla publicity stunt
Though it makes popular and groundbreaking electric vehicles, Tesla has had a less than stellar track record when it comes to the company’s more ambitious future-facing projects. CEO Elon Musk’s 2019 promise of unleashing a million autonomous “robotaxis” onto America’s streets and highways has failed to materialize while the “full self-driving” technology that promise was premised on has failed drivers with such stunning regularity that the NHTSA has launched a federal investigation into it. So are we to believe that the same man whose company once designed a cut-rate mini-submarine and tried to distribute knock-off ventilators is capable of building a fully-functional robot prototype within the year?