SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (R) gestures as he arrives on the red carpet for the Axel Springer Awards Ceremony in Berlin on December 1, 2020.
Britta Pedersen | AFP | Getty Images
On Tuesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted on Twitter that he was thinking of selling his electric car company to Apple in recent years, but Apple CEO Tim Cook was not even interested in meeting.
Specifically, Musk wrote in a tweet on December 22:
“In the darkest days of the Model 3 program, we contacted Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla (for 1/10 of our current value). He refused to take the meeting.”
On Tuesday, Musk also commented on the lithium-phosphate batteries that Apple has developed for use in vehicles, according to a Reuters report on Monday.
“Strange, if true,” Musk said wrote. “Tesla is already using iron phosphate for medium-range cars from our Shanghai plant. – A single-cell is electrochemically impossible because the maximum voltage is ~ 100X too low. Maybe they meant cells tied together, like would it be our structural battery pack? “
It was a rare admission from the Mercurial CEO that he once considered giving up control of the company, which he helped build and gain more market value than the top nine carmakers. Tesla has not discussed a sale in any financial records.
In 2018, Musk said publicly the car business was “hell”, and that he slept at the factory to try to solve the company’s problems while trying to start mass-producing his Model 3 electric sedans.
He previously said in a tweet that Tesla once received it “About a month” from bankruptcy during the growth of Model 3 – a detail that the company never revealed in its quarterly documents.
Tesla and Apple have always competed for talent in Silicon Valley and beyond. In 2015, Musk named Apple the Tesla Cemetery. “If you fail at Tesla, you go to work for Apple,” he said at the time.
In July 2018, Apple hired Tesla chief engineer Doug Field – a former Apple employee – back at the company, following dozens of other employees.
At the time, Tesla told CNBC in a statement about Apple’s ability to destroy key employees: “Tesla is the hard way. We have 100 times less money than Apple, so of course I can afford to pay more. We are in extremely difficult battles against entrenched car companies that produce 100 times more cars than we did last year, so of course it is a very hard job. “
Apple never acknowledged plans to build a car, but Cook acknowledged that it worked on “autonomous systems” that could be used in autopilot cars or for other purposes.
Apple and Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.