Elon Musk today tweeted saying he considered selling Tesla to Apple during Model 3 ramp, but Tim Cook didn't even want to take a meeting.
Tim Cook may have missed a golden opportunity to buy Tesla. It was Elon Musk who, in a tweet, wrote that at the height of the "darkest days" of the development of the Model 3, the Tesla's CEO had sought to discuss with his counterpart at Apple on the possibility of an acquisition of Tesla. Apple could have pocketed Tesla for a tenth of its current value (about $60 billion), said Musk, and concluded that Tim Cook refused to see him.
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.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2020
"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," Musk tweeted a few hours ago.
The Model 3 program has been particularly difficult for Tesla. Between the announcement of the vehicle in 2016 , the start of production in 2017 , and the marketing of the vehicle two years later , the manufacturer has gone through all the colors. So much so that the company came close to industrial disaster, unable for a long time to adapt its production tool to demand. Elon Musk's fads about robotizing assembly lines didn't help either.
We can therefore imagine that the proposal of the boss of Tesla revolved around 2018, when the difficulties surrounding the Model 3 were the most important. The wings of the Titan project, behind which hides Apple's automotive ambition, had been planed in 2016 to better focus on the software part. No one knows where this project was at the time of Musk's offer, but Tim Cook certainly weighed the pros and cons of a Tesla acquisition and how it could fit into Apple's technical and industrial Meccano. .
Elon Musk's explosive tweet is part of a reaction to Reuters rumor of an Apple car launching production in 2024. He considers the whole story strange, knowing Tesla is already using lithium-iron technology. -phosphate that the Apple could use for the single-cell battery of its own vehicle - it therefore has nothing of the "revolution" announced by Reuters. Musk also points to an electrochemical problem for this type of battery.
Armen Hareyan is the founder and the Editor in Chief of Torque News. He founded TorqueNews.com in 2010, which since then has been publishing expert news and analysis about the automotive industry. He can be reached at Torque News Twitter, Facebok, Linkedin and Youtube.
