Musk has been engaged in a hiring battle, pitting Tesla against Apple, as the latter has plans to throw its hat into the automotive industry and create its own electric car. Reports have surfaced, claiming Apple has been poaching Tesla engineers with signing bonuses over $250K and 60% bumps in salary.
Musk isn’t worried, though. Not even one bit. In fact, Tesla has not had to deal with the problem in any serious way, as Tesla is the top recruiter in talent.
The bombshell:
“If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I’m not kidding,” Musk emphatically says.
Musk and company at Tesla noted that they jokingly call Apple the “Tesla Graveyard,” and that Apple only hires the engineers Tesla fired.
All jokes aside, Musk says it’s a good thing that Apple will be competitive:
“Did you ever take a look at the Apple Watch? (laughs) No, seriously: It’s good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction. But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can’t just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car. But for Apple, the car is the next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation. A new pencil or a bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough.”
Musk, of course, is not ruling out snagging talent from Apple. A report from earlier this year said that Tesla hired 150 former Apple employees.
For its part, Apple expects to have their own all-electric car ready to sell by 2019. We can expect no shortage of snark from Musk in the meantime.
