If Apple ever does get around to building an electric car, no-one would welcome the move more than Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
In Tesla’s Q1 earnings call yesterday, the pioneering entrepreneur behind Tesla, Space X and, most recently, revolutionary solar batteries chimed in on Apple’s reported electric car plans.
Here’s what he had to say.
“I actually hope Apple gets into the car business, that would be great,” Musk noted.
While this sounds like a sarcastic quip on the surface (reminiscent of Apple’s classic “Welcome, IBM. Seriously” ad), Elon Musk has actually been pretty welcoming of other companies looking to enter the electric car space.
In June last year, the company famously made all its patents freely available to competitors as a way of stimulating growth and investment in the sector.
Were Apple to create its own electric car, Musk likely knows that the move would legitimize electric vehicles in a similar way to how the iPod made MP3 players mainstream, or the Apple Watch did the same for wearables.
But Musk also took the opportunity of yesterday’s earnings call to set straight the report that a number of Tesla engineers were leaving for Apple. “Anyone can find this out by going on LinkedIn,” he said. “If you look at the trailing 12 months, Tesla has recruited something like 5x as many people from Apple as Apple has from Tesla.”
There have been rumors of an Apple Car ever since Steve Jobs was running the company, but they picked up momentum earlier this year after Apple-leased cars were spotted roaming the streets with what looked like advanced mapping tools. After this, a separate report claimed that Tim Cook has tapped Apple VP Steve Zadesky to lead a mystery project called “Titan” with 1,000 Apple employees working on a car project.
Tim Cook has even been asked directly by shareholders about the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla. “We don’t really have a relationship with them,” Cook replied with a weirdly evasive answer. “Was that a good way to avoid the question?” he said, following up.
We’ll have to wait to see if anything comes of this, but in the meantime yesterday’s response from Musk confirms what we already knew: That the man is nothing if not supremely confident.
Whether he’s right to be remains to be seen.
