Elon Musk says had once reached out to Apple for acquiring Tesla
MacDailyNews Webmaster
Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk said on Tuesday he reached out to Apple CEO Tim Cook in 2018, “during the darkest days of the Model 3 program,” to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla for a tenth of its current value.
Elon Musk“He refused to take the meeting”, said Musk, CEO of electric-car maker Tesla, replying to a Twitter chain which cited a Reuters story on Apple looking to produce a passenger vehicle by 2024 with a new battery technology.
Tesla overcame the problems and has since racked up a string of quarterly profits. The electric automaker became one of the most valuable companies to join the S&P 500 when it became part of the widely followed stock index on Monday.
Apple’s automotive efforts, known as Project Titan, have proceeded unevenly since 2014 when it first started to design its own vehicle from scratch. Central to the company’s strategy for auto production is a new battery design that could “radically” reduce the cost of batteries and increase the vehicle’s range.
In the same Twitter chain, Musk said “monocell”, which Apple plans to use in its design, “is electrochemically impossible as max voltage is ~100X too low” unless they are bonded together.
MacDailyNews Take: Oops.
A nice little Christmas present from Elon Musk to Tim Cook, “operations genius,” (not acquisitions genius).
Tesla is currently valued at $598.277 billion.
Here are Musk’s tweets on the subject:
During the darkest days of the Model 3 program, I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla (for 1/10 of our current value). He refused to take the meeting.
