Lifestyle
Elon Musk hires Tesla interns who helped solve Model 3 production issues
Mark Comeau and Matthew Lane from the Memorial University of Newfoundland were serving as interns at Tesla when they spotted a point for improvement in the Model 3 production line. Less than two months later, the pair were personally invited by Elon Musk to join the electric car maker.
Matthew and Mark were no strangers to Musk’s projects. The pair had worked on the SpaceX Hyperloop competition in the past, and this year, they are returning to help judge the 2018 competition in July. The engineering students started their Tesla internship in January, where they worked at both the Fremont factory in California and at the Gigafactory in Nevada.
In an interview at CBC Radio’s St. John’s Morning Show, the pair described the series of events that transpired which eventually led to their hiring. According to Matthew, it all started when he and Mark came up with a solution to a gating problem in the Model 3 line.
Engineering students Mark Comeau and Matthew Lane were personally hired by Elon Musk after the pair solved a problem in the Model 3’s production line. [Credit: Paula Gale/CBC]
“Essentially, it was a gating problem with the Model 3 production ramp. What had happened was we saw an opportunity to solve the problem. We came up with our own idea, and we actually sort of crashed the meeting with Elon himself and presented the idea. And, after speaking with him and one of his VPs, Doug Field, they essentially said ‘This is a good idea, but here’s the problem we are facing right now, so you guys go talk with us.’ And it snowballed from there,” he said.
Much to the pair’s surprise, Musk opted to follow through on their suggestions. Matthew and Mark worked on their solution to the Model 3 line’s gating problem, and not long after bringing things online, they were eventually called to the Gigafactory to address a new set of challenges.
“So about a month and a half after that, we worked on this issue, brought things online. And then, literally at 10 a.m. Monday morning, the week after we’re finished, we received a message saying ‘Hey, head to Nevada to the Gigafactory.’ And, a five-hour car drive later, we arrived in Nevada, with a whole new situation and a whole new set of problems to address,” Mark said.
It was after they were able to address the issues in Gigafactory 1 that Musk suggested that they stay with the company. Mark elaborated on their encounter with Elon Musk at the Nevada factory.
“Elon is the type of CEO that is actually hands-on in the factory floor. He’s not one of those that sits on the ivory tower and just gets reports. He’s actually on the line, seeing the issues himself in person, and seeing what contributions people are making, and what the issues are. He doesn’t like to hear things second-hand. He likes everything first-hand knowledge.
“So this issue had caused some delays with the production, so of course it was one thing that was always on his radar, and once we had figured it out and got it up and running reliably, he came by, and he had us walk through it. It’s probably one of the most unnerving experiences ever, because he’s the CEO of the company and here we are, just two interns. And, he’s basically like ‘Yep, you’ve got to stay.’”
The Tesla Model 3 gets assembled. [Credit: Tesla]
Mark is now hired as a special projects engineer for Tesla. Matthew will be returning to school for the summer semester, but he’ll be back at the electric car maker for the fall. The pair sees themselves as firefighters, deployed to areas in the company where there are issues that await solutions.
Ultimately, the story of how Mark Comeau and Matthew Lane got personally hired by Elon Musk is a testament to Tesla’s practice of allowing communication to travel through the shortest path necessary. The pair, after all, were engineering interns, and in any other company setting, it would have taken a lot of red tape before the pair would have been able to propose their solution to the CEO. This particular culture was highlighted by Musk in a leaked email last month, when he specifically stated that communication through “chain of command” should never be done.
“Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the ‘chain of command.’ A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen,” Musk wrote.
Elon Musk
How to use Grok Bot to block spam calls and texts
Musk told users to ask Grok Bot to scrub their phone numbers from spam lists.
Elon Musk has a new use case for Grok Bot, and it is the spam call. On Thursday he replied to an X user named Arash with a short instruction: “Ask your @Grok @Bot to remove your phone number from spam call & text lists!” Arash had said he got tired of the calls, had an AI bot find his number on listing sites and file removal requests, and packaged the process as a free skill for others.
The skill is called Spam-Call Scrubber, which is described to find a phone number on people search sites and data brokers, submits the opt outs, completes the confirmation emails those sites send back, and rechecks on a schedule the user picks. Using it requires the Grok Bot app. The pitch is time saved, since most broker opt outs sit behind separate forms on separate sites.
Ask your @Grok @Bot to remove your phone number from spam call & text lists!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 15, 2026
Musk said Grok Bot now gives each bot its own email address, and that it can detect scam emails. On Thursday he also said SpaceX would make users whole if the bot botches a purchase or leaks a card, then told users to shop away from Amazon after the retailer blocked the agent, as Teslarati reported. The terms of service we reviewed at the time put responsibility for what an agent does on the user.
For Tesla owners, Grok Bot is not just a phone app. Tesla brought Grok Bot into its vehicles on September 22, and we argued earlier this week that the Cybercab’s real advantage may be the errands it runs during a ride. Every Cybercab and the rest of the Model Y Robotaxi fleet has it enabled. The more routine tasks like this one become, the more a rider has reason to hand over something personal in the back seat.
The new Spam-Call Scrubber skill can be downloaded for free and works on sites that honor removal requests, while noting that listings can reappear, and illegal robocallers do not check any registry. Whether Spam-Call Scrubber cuts anyone’s call volume is something the first wave of users will find out, and Musk’s endorsement guarantees that wave is coming.
For a century, the car has asked the same thing of its owner, which is basically to pay attention. Even the best ride-hailing app like Uber or Lyft only moved the problem into someone else’s hands. You stopped driving, but you still sat in a stranger’s car, while half listening, and wondering whether to take a phone call in the car without being rude. The Cybercab has no wheel, no pedals and no driver. With Grok @bot now live inside it, it becomes something else entirely, and I think that matters more than the fleet count that everyone is tracking.
Grok @bot is an agent, not a voice assistant. A rider signs in once, and from then on can say what they need and watch it happen. Order dinner from a favorite restaurant. Fill the grocery cart. Move money, answer email, adjust a calendar, push a work project forward. Tesla engineer Yun-Ta Tsai confirmed it is enabled across every Cybercab and the rest of the Model Y fleet, and Tesla’s own pitch is that Full Self-Driving handles the commute while Grok handles the errands.
Think about what that does to a thirty minute ride. Uber sells you a trip, while Waymo sells you the same trip in a more private setting. Tesla is selling the thirty minutes themselves, returned to you with an assistant attached. Errands that used to eat a Saturday get done between pickup and drop off. The ride stops being dead time between two places and becomes a place of its own.
Tesla integrates Grok Bot into its vehicles for the ultimate personal assistant
Best of all, your Bots follow you into any Cybercab, and presumably your own Tesla, then logs you out automatically when you step out. Anyone can bolt a chatbot onto a screen, but much harder to own the vehicle, the autonomy stack and the assistant at once. It also quietly ties SpaceX’s Super Intelligence business to Tesla’s fleet, after Tesla converted its xAI stake into SpaceX equity. The relationship between those two companies is getting harder to describe as separate.
This is also where the hard questions start, because an agent that can spend your money in a vehicle other people also ride in needs some answers. How does it handle a voice it shouldn’t trust? What gets recorded, who can see it, and for how long? What happens when a rider leaves halfway through a task?
If Tesla gets those answers right, the scoreboard changes. We have been counting Cybercabs and wait times. The more telling number may be what riders accomplish per trip. That is data almost no one else will ever have, and it is the real reason to watch Grok @bot.
What do you think? Leave me a comment.
Lifestyle
Tesla’s mirrorless Cybercab will give riders a visibility upgrade
Tesla engineer confirms Cybercab update letting riders pull up rear and repeater cameras on demand.
Tesla is working on a Cybercab update that would let passengers pull up the vehicle’s rear and side cameras on demand, and the request came straight from a rider.
The exchange played out on X late Friday. Cybercab rider Dan Burkland shared photos of the two-seater’s cabin screen after an evening ride, praised the UI team’s work, and left one request: let riders open the rear and repeater cameras whenever they want, “especially for peace of mind.” Tesla UI software engineer Evan (@CarCoder) answered with two words: “In development.”
The Tesla UI team absolutely crushed it with the infotainment software. Nicely done @CarCoder!
One feature request: Allow folks to pull up the rear & repeater cameras on demand. This would be great especially for peace of mind. https://t.co/mNAOSLx6pE
— Dan Burkland (@DBurkland) October 10, 2026
The idea fits a pattern Teslarati has tracked since public rides began. Days after paid Cybercab service opened in Austin, Tesla sent riders a survey that asked them to rate the touchscreen, the app and the cabin, and to pick the features they wanted most. We reported on that survey in September, and a camera view is the kind of small software change Tesla can push quickly if riders keep asking.
It also speaks to something unique about the vehicle. With no steering wheel, no pedals and no driver, passengers have no mirror to check and no way to see behind them. The hardware is clearly built for camera awareness, from the repeater cameras to the rear camera. Letting a passenger look through those same cameras would give a nervous first time rider a way to confirm what is around the car.
The timing matters because the fleet is growing fast. Tesla’s Robotaxi account said on Saturday that more than 300 Cybercabs are now serving Austin, an eightfold increase in 30 days, and Tesla AI chief Ashok Elluswamy named Dallas as the next city. More cars and more cities mean more people riding in a driverless vehicle for the first time, which is exactly when small trust features carry weight.
For now, the feature is confirmed only as in development. If Tesla follows its usual pattern with Cybercab software, riders could see it appear in a point release without any announcement, and Teslarati will watch for it.
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