Elon Musk Says He Once Considered Selling Tesla To Apple, Tim Cook Didn't Want To Take a Meeting (cnbc.com) 99
On Tuesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he considered selling his electric car company to Apple in recent years, but Apple CEO Tim Cook was not even interested in taking a meeting. CNBC reports: Specifically, Musk wrote in a tweet on December 22: "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." It was a rare admission from the mercurial CEO that he once considered giving up control of the company he helped build and take to a market value that's more than the top nine automakers combined. Tesla has not discussed a sale in any financial filing.
On Tuesday, Musk also made remarks about lithium iron phosphate batteries that Apple is reportedly developing for use in vehicles, per a Reuters report on Monday. "Strange, if true," Musk wrote. "Tesla already uses iron-phosphate for medium range cars made in our Shanghai factory.- A monocell is electrochemically impossible, as max voltage is ~100X too low. Maybe they meant cells bonded together, like our structural battery pack?"
On Tuesday, Musk also made remarks about lithium iron phosphate batteries that Apple is reportedly developing for use in vehicles, per a Reuters report on Monday. "Strange, if true," Musk wrote. "Tesla already uses iron-phosphate for medium range cars made in our Shanghai factory.- A monocell is electrochemically impossible, as max voltage is ~100X too low. Maybe they meant cells bonded together, like our structural battery pack?"
Bad idea anyway. (Score:1)
Tesla needed a leader. Not a yesman of a former leader who'd be better suited at Microsoft.
Just maybe ... a less crazy one. So Apple'd be out in any case.
Re:Bad idea anyway. (Score:5, Insightful)
Tesla needed a leader. Not a yesman of a former leader who'd be better suited at Microsoft.
Yeah, Tim is obviously incompetent. Sure, during his 9-year tenure as CEO, he has created more shareholder value than any other executive in the entire history of the world, but still, what a luzr.
Re:Bad idea anyway. (Score:5, Insightful)
Cook would have been absolutely the wrong type of person to get Tesla 3 through production hell. He wouldn't know what to do with that situation. It's a boot-strapping type of task that requires real risk-taking in the face of no-guarantee-of-success. Cook was right to take a pass on Tesla. Mush was exactly the right person for that, even though he was probably getting burned out by the process.
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I don't think it's was as much about burnout as the need for money. He's talking about the period where they were burning through cash so fast that they had very little runway left. And Apple had a huge pile of cash, and was known to be working on a car themselves.
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Honestly, Cook seems like the ideal operations guy who could have benefitted Tesla. Despite the total dissimilarity, both a smart phone and a car have complex supply chains and distribution channels and Cook seems adept at iterating the iPhone technology platform even if the iterations lack the Jobs "wow" factor.
The question would be whether he's savvy enough to make Tesla margins high enough without the huge economy of scale iPhone can drive while maintaining pricing levels. The battery systems might hav
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Scaling up something like Tesla to Model 3 production is a bit closer to a large-risk startup. No guarantee of success, and very few previously-existing models to emulate. Scaling up EV production hadn't been done before. Requires a ground-breaker, not an optimizer.
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It ought not to be that much more difficult than any other vehicle assembly, the real challenge in scaling up components like battery packs and the motors which have less established supply chains.
But Tesla's assembly problems have been much worse given the number of complaints about awful fit and finish of non-EV aspects of their cars, so I think Cook might have been a net positive in any case.
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Tim Cook is an awesome implementer. He took the crazy-successful vision and momentum that Apple had generated and continued to push in the same direction. It takes great skill, but not a lot of imagination. It takes a different sort of person to fix a company that's ailing, or has grown stale, or needs to get off the ground. That's more of a Steve Jobs type of thing.
Cook would have been absolutely the wrong type of person to get Tesla 3 through production hell. He wouldn't know what to do with that situation. It's a boot-strapping type of task that requires real risk-taking in the face of no-guarantee-of-success. Cook was right to take a pass on Tesla. Mush was exactly the right person for that, even though he was probably getting burned out by the process.
One of the primary complaints about Cook when he took over was that he came up via operations, including management of supply chains and manufacturing, rather than something more fuzzy like marketing or design. So in that sense, it seems like he'd be an excellent match if Tesla could poach him away. You mention that he's "an awesome implementer", and AFAICT the problem with the Tesla 3 wasn't that nobody wanted it, or that it was the wrong car, or that they needed to invent previously-unheard-of technolog
Re: Bad idea anyway. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Shareholder value isn't the only important measure of a company or a CEO.
This is a true statement. However, to company executives and employees, shareholder value in the form of recent and future stock price appreciation is by far the most important metric of company success because it's the only metric that directly benefits the executives and employees. All other metrics are either either feel-good moral victories or successes that might or might not indirectly benefit some employees.
Re: Bad idea anyway. (Score:2)
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As an employee I'd rate the ability to pay me each month above shareholder value. The ability to give me useful experiences above it. Career progression also. Working environment. In fact, shareholder value is not that important a metric to most employees, I expect.
I agree with you intrinsically, and this is true for many companies and many employees. However, for the employees of a lot of Silicon Valley companies, particularly the ones that have come into existence in the last 20 years, stock bonuses, options, RSU, and ESPP are what's important. We're talking literally millions of dollars for many workers. Google base salaries are extremely good, but it's the stock bonuses that make it really hard to compete with Google for employees. All the benefits that you me
Re: Bad idea anyway. (Score:2)
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Unless you are in the door quite early, then you aren't going to be making millions from stock options. Many companies fail. When I was looking at potentially joining one of them (several options) relatively early, stock options were not a big factor for me because of that. I'd rather have something I can really 'take to the bank' and pay the bills with and have anything else be a bonus should it actually arise. I can then take the actual money banked from wages and diversify.
You're right about pre-IPO stock. Aside from founders and very early employees, the payout for most people will be low six figures, and that's only if they're lucky. However, it's not uncommon for RSU and ESPP over the years at many tech companies to approach a million dollars. Considering the stock price appreciation over the last five years, a Google employee only needed to receive $110k/year in stock to have one million now. Looking on glassdoor, that's not extraordinary at Google. A similar person
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Unless you are in the door quite early, then you aren't going to be making millions from stock options. Many companies fail. When I was looking at potentially joining one of them (several options) relatively early, stock options were not a big factor for me because of that. I'd rather have something I can really 'take to the bank' and pay the bills with and have anything else be a bonus should it actually arise. I can then take the actual money banked from wages and diversify.
You're right about pre-IPO stock. Aside from founders and very early employees, the payout for most people will be low six figures, and that's only if they're lucky. However, it's not uncommon for RSU and ESPP over the years at many tech companies to approach a million dollars. Considering the stock price appreciation over the last five years, a Google employee only needed to receive $110k/year in stock to have one million now. Looking on glassdoor, that's not extraordinary at Google. A similar person at AMD would have only needed to receive $8k/year to have one million now. And these are just the low-ranking workers. The payoff for executives is much larger. Executive get so many shares that even a small appreciation in the stock price is worth a lot of money. That's why the temptation of stocks is the single greatest driving force for corporations.
$110k/year in just stock doesn't sound like low-ranking to me.
Re: Bad idea anyway. (Score:2)
Re: Bad idea anyway. (Score:2)
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Shareholder value is a direct quantitative judgment of a company's future prospects by people putting their money on the line.
It isn't the only measure, but it is the most important one. If you fail at it, you fail completely.
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Shareholder value isn't the only important measure of a company or a CEO.
Said every bankrupt company CEO.
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How much of Apple's growth can be attributed directly to Cook, and not the momentum he inherited from Jobs?
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/. needs a (-3; SPAM) mod option that doesn't count against mod points.
Every fucking thread, these cunts.
Re:Bad idea anyway. (Score:4, Insightful)
I’m not sure you know what the word “literal” means.
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So subsidizing electric vehicles in a bid to reduce our carbon footprint is bad and only serves to fill Elon's pockets.
Spending trillions on the military is still cool though, right?
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Tim Cook has been an amazing CEO for Apple, and Elon Musk has been a great CEO for Tesla. I'm not sure either one would have been very good as the leader of the other company. Apple would probably not have gotten Tesla to its current valuation, so basically, I think Cook was a lot smarter than Musk in not taking this call. If Apple does a car, they'll do it their own way, and everyone-- Apple, Tesla, and customers-- will be better for it.
I don't blame Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
Tesla is way overpriced even at 1/10th of its current value. The only reason it has a high valuation is speculation.
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All value of anything is speculative. What thing's value do you think doesn't depend on speculation?
When you buy shares in Microsoft you are speculating they won't F up their next version of Office and Windows.
When you buy a toe nail clipper you are speculating that it will provide more value in toe nail clippings than the amount you paid for it.
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What sort of speculation values Tesla at more than the rest of the entire car industry put together?
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What sort of speculation values Tesla at more than the rest of the entire car industry put together?
It's not all about cars.
Something like this..
The future Tesla might:
Own the autonomous transport infrastructure.
Own the means of electrical power generation and storage
Be the biggest supplier of voltaic cells to all markets
Be the largest vendor of cars in an all EV world
Have
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Just don't assume that Tesla's stock price has anything at all to do with the company itself or its prospects.
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>Just don't assume that Tesla's stock price has anything at all to do with the company itself or its prospects.
It certainly does have something to do with the company's prospects, but also a lot to do with the computerized trading strategies and the index funds.
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That puts it with BMW.
If I had a choice today %0.0001 of BMW or %0.0001 of Tesla to do nothing with for 10 years I'd go with Tesla right now.
I'd want Hyundai or VW if I were given my pick of any though.
GM is up there too, but they just don't seem to make cars that are cool. Like they seem to get all the stuff to make something cool in a checklist, and then make something that's boring, and their reliability isn't good enough to coast on that. If their reliability was top notch I'd pi
For $61 billion (Score:2)
Musk says he offered to sell Tesla for ~$60 billion, above its market value at the time. It's not surprisin Cook didn't take the meeting - he could have bought VW (and their iconic designs) for less.
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Yes, there's no iconic designs. No overlap between people who love the VW Beetle or the VW Bus and Apple customers.
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Yes, there's no iconic designs. No overlap between people who love the VW Beetle
People love the VW Beetle so much they stopped making the updated version in 2019 which was basically the same shape as the original but impractically large...
And it's not like anyone at VW today even came up with that well-known design, (or the VW Bus), those people are no longer with the company and probably dead by now. The ones who designed the update were simply copying the original ideas from before.
So what exactly would
Re: Super bad comparison (Score:1)
He said 20 years. Those vehicles (or at least, the "iconic" variants) weren't produced in that time. Not only that, but they're iconic more in a sense of being a throwback to the days when hippies roamed the earth. Besides, nobody actually wants a VW, they just get suckered into them by a salesman.
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The Beetle was definitely produced in the last 20 years. And yes, they were all bought by people who wished they were hippies in the 1960s. And yes, those people all owned iPhones.
The last few parts are obviously just the people I knew, but...
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The Beetle was definitely produced in the last 20 years.
The person you were responding to said "the iconic variants". The weak remakes were not "the iconic variants". People remember the original Beetle, not the re-release... no-one thinks twice if the modern Beetle rolls down the street, but heads turn when you see an original Beetle.
The only thing VW really added to the original that was new and not worse, was a flower vase. I am pretty sure Apple does not need to spend $80 billon to find a good way to
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The original Beetle was still in production up to 2004 in Mexico. The second generation VW Bus, or the T2, was in production in Brazil all the way up to 2013! So the last 20 years does include the iconic designs, just not in the US where we got that plasticky Beetle remake, and a rebadged Mopar van instead. Of course, there's no way they could have gotten those cool but ancient designs approved for sale in the US with the current regulations.
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Sure, nobody wants a design that's a rectangle with rounded corners.
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I don't think you understand what you are saying here.
VW designs are basically "boxy", there is very little iconic about them. I can't remember what any VW's from the past 20 years look like myself.
Nothing at all iconic about Bugatti, Lamborghini, Bentley, Porsche, and Ducati. no sir (unless you forgot that "VW" has even more vehicle brands than GM does?)
Volkswagen AG is not Volkswagen (Score:1)
I'm talking about Volkswagen, not the Volkswagen AG. Maybe you forgot they are distinct [wikipedia.org]?
However, what distinctive design has come from even though higher tier brands in recent years? It sure seems like most of it is either forgettable or leans heavily on classic elements.
Are you going to lie to my face and tell me a Cayenne is memorable in any way?
I could be convinced the SiÃn is actually kind of new and interesting (even though the basic shape harkens back decades), but that is about it.
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Cayenne is memorable for being the butt ugliest Porsche ever made.
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Cayenne is memorable for being the butt ugliest Porsche ever made.
OK, I 100% agree on that one!!!
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I'm well aware of the difference between the VM brand and VW AG. You may well have been talking about the brand, but given the post you were responding to was in context of "buying Volkswagen" the context was the Group, and not the brand. All of the things I mentioned (and then some) come as part of that sale.
Analogy: Them: "They should buy GM." You: "Chevrolets are ugly" Me: "but GMC trucks are attractive." You: "There's a difference between Chevrolet and GMC"
VW? The diesel scammers? (Score:1)
Apple has enough resources to come up with an aluminium unibody design for a car.
Maybe getting some inspiration from the DeLorian although that would make it look like a Tesla Truck rip off.
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A Karmann-Ghia would be pretty sweet.
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VW was not for sale, so Cook could not have bought VW.
The German automakers are a whole lot of baggage, just like any entrenched automaker. Except they are also married to a bunch of garbage product lines with shit Bosch components and diesel cheating (which they all did.)
It would make no sense for Apple to take on all the liabilities of one of the big auto makers. They can do their own design, in fact they insist upon it.
It's related to UBER selling... (Score:1)
Re:It's related to UBER selling... (Score:4, Informative)
There will only be two big self driving winners at most. The one the trucking industry settles on, and the one the livery industry settles on, and there really is no reason for either to be uber or tesla or google or apple or any of the other companies currently dumping money into it. In fact, the trucking industry will just buy a company with a solution. Entire company. No leasing. No deals. Purchase. This excludes all the big names.
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I wonder if a trucking company (singular) would buy the self-driving truck company outright, deny access to them to all the other trucking companies.
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That's all a lot of bullshit, frankly. All the big trucking companies are working on self-driving. Freightliner (Mercedes) for example. "The trucking industry" is not one business.
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What I meant was a single US trucking company (or some merger of two top 5 companies) buys out a promising self-driving truck technology company in order to get a lock on the technology. Or in reverse, to speed adoption, a top-5 trucking company is bought by a major truck manufacturer to push their self-driving technology.
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What I meant was a single US trucking company (or some merger of two top 5 companies) buys out a promising self-driving truck technology company in order to get a lock on the technology.
AFAIK the most promising self-driving truck technology is owned by the aforementioned Freightliner, which is part of Mercedes, and neither is for sale. They've been testing on public roads since 2014.
Thank goodness it did not happen (Score:1)
Horrible Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no doubt Apple would have doubled or even tripled the value of their investment.
They would not have turned it into the largest automobile company in the world.
Re: Horrible Idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Tesla is not the largest automobile company in the world by any metric other than stock value. That tells you that the stock value is vastly overrated.
Re: Horrible Idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, that's not how that works. That's not how any of this works.
Stock are how we figure out how something is valued, not comparisons to older, less innovative companies.
Basically you are in the position of someone saying "Well these new fangled horseless carriage companies are WAY over priced - just look at how many carriage 'Horse and Buggy' sells every year."
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Stock are how we figure out how something is valued, not comparisons to older, less innovative companies.
Huh? So we look at stocks of Tesla to see how it's valued. And then at Toyota, VW, GM, and Ford combined, and see how they're valued. And then we compare.
You are in the position of someone saying "guys these tulips I got are going to be the most important commodity in the world".
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In the case of Tesla it's mostly speculation about their "full self driving" technology and the potential revenue from that. If they ever get it working and start up a robotaxi service, or become an OEM supplier to other manufacturers, it could be worth far more than just building cars ever will be.
If it doesn't work or someone else beats them to it and makes them largely irrelevant by the time it's done then the speculators lose.
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The entrenched automakers can and will come up to speed on EVs, because they are much much simpler than the vehicles they have been building. And once they do, their business networks will let them outcompete Tesla. That they have been failing to do this for so long is a testament to the poor quality of their leadership, and has little to nothing to do with their technical capabilities. As such, Tesla is clearly overvalued; even Musk has said as much.
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Stock price is not the only—nor the most accurate—way to value a company. If you want to determine what the "largest automobile company" is it would make more sense to look at total capital, revenue, profit, or some other metric.
Stocks are, indeed, how we figure out how something is valued. Unfortunately, you do not seem to understand what that "something" is.
Here's the best analogy I can come up with on the fly. If everyone in Vegas is placing money on team X to win a game over team Y, then tea
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Mitsubishi made more than a million cars in 2017 - Tesla only made 1 million total by March this year ...
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It would have been a huge capital sink and they'd have lost money on it.
Elon met with SteveJobs (Score:1)
It didn’t go well.
Back when Apple did not have a replacement for SteveJobs. Steve thought Elon’s ideas crazy, not a fit for Apple or its products. Tim Cook knows Elon history. Tim would never counter SteveJobs’ made-decision.
Elon has done well cloning Apple. Elon has one bettered Apple producing an EV platform than Apple’s done making one car. While Tesla has revolutionized the automotive industry employing OTA update Apple-style Apple haven’t disrupted the EV or car space.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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TSLA's P/E ratio is over 1200. TEN YEARS after their IPO. That's a bubble.
Either a bubble, or a company that dominates a new industry segment that is poised for explosive growth. Maybe two or three new industries.
Time will tell, of course, but the shorts have been consistently wrong for a rather long time now.
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Even if they dominated the EV industry, it wouldn't make them worth more than every car company in the world put together. And they don't even dominate the EV industry, they're just one of the bigger players. Not that there's any guarantee that they'll grow with the market.
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TSLA's P/E ratio is over 1200. TEN YEARS after their IPO. That's a bubble.
Either a bubble, or a company that dominates a new industry segment that is poised for explosive growth. Maybe two or three new industries.
Time will tell, of course, but the shorts have been consistently wrong for a rather long time now.
Someone once said The Market Can Remain Irrational Longer Than You Can Remain Solvent [quoteinvestigator.com].
For Tesla to justify its valuation it needs to continue to dominate the EV segment even as EVs overtake the market.
I don't think that's a realistic assumption.
Cars are fundamentally generic. There's huge capital costs to get started, but once you're started it costs Company A about the same as Company B to build a similar car.
Tesla can't dominate EVs with a huge profit margin since someone will sell better cars for less.
Ma
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That's what happens with a decade of rock bottom interest rates and the government printing trillions of dollars to pump the markets.
overpriced (Score:2)
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The only thing apple did was make it look sexy so the sheep would buy it.
What you fail to understand is that the UI is what sells. Apple has been a master at making things simple to use, which isn't what geeks necessarily want, but the masses do. As of 2020, there are ~1.5 Billion active iPhones. That's a lot of sheep...BAH.
Re: overpriced (Score:1)
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Functionality that the masses don't give a shit about. FWIW, I got into computers in the early 70s, and bought my first Mac in '84, one of several over the years, though I currently only have PCs. You're focused on the minutia, while Apple focused on what would get more people to use computers, phones, etc. And that's all fine...Apple isn't for you. But don't blame everyone else for loving the interface just because you want to geek out.
Re: overpriced (Score:1)
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The only thing apple did was make it look sexy so the sheep would buy it.
Apple were smart enough to realise that for most people, a phone is an item of jewellery not technology.
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So Tim Cook is not as big an idiot as I thought. At 1/10th current price at a time they were on the verge of bankruptcy that is massively overpriced
Agreed. I love my X, but what Elon has managed to do is generate hype and ridden that hype past a seriously dangerous point in his company’s development to the point where they are now a successful car company. It’s not something that was by any means a likely outcome, and while he deserves props for doing it, getting in on that would have been a massive gamble for Tim.
I hope Elon continues. I hope the FSD version currently in beta comes out to Denmark soon (seems unlikely). I hope that he conti
Regrets? (Score:2)
Does Elon still regret this today?
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It seems like every companies are doing this today. It's not like the old days. :( I still use very old stuff like my over decade old PCs, analog stuff, VGA, PS/2, etc.
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It seems like every companies are doing this today.
No, no other car companies are doing this today. If you need a motor for another kind of car, if it's still in production then they will sell you one. Or a transmission, or a whatever.
Once vehicles are out of production then parts supply is a whole different problem. The automaker won't have any engines to sell you, but they should have replacement parts. Once the vehicle hits a certain age (which IIRC is around ten years) then the suppliers can start selling you the parts directly, and then parts availabil
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My dad soups up older cars. He does this by directly purchasing "replacement" motors and transmissions from manufacturers. Back when they were still in production, he purchased a motor and transmission for a Corvette LT-1 to put in a '33 Ford Coupe. Talk about overpowered.
Nightmare territory (Score:2)
My sympathy to the poor souls