“Important engineers? They have hired people we’ve fired”, Musk told Handelsblatt.
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‘We always jokingly call Apple the “Tesla Graveyard”.
Musk conceded that a “car is the next logical thing” for Apple, but says that iPhones and the Apple Watch are not almost as complex as an automobile. At the time, Apple was reportedly offering a few Tesla employees $250,000 signing bonuses and 60 percent raises to jump ship.
The sick burns continued when Musk was asked if he took Apple seriously as a competitor in the automotive market. A common refrain is that the Model X price is too high.
In fact the rumors claim that the poaching of employees is so bad that it has apparently affected the development of Tesla’s cars. You can’t just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a vehicle. “No, seriously: it’s good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction”, he added. “But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches”. However this isn’t necessarily a confirmation that Apple is building an electric auto, but Musk does seem to be pretty confident that is the case.
Of course, since the beginning of this year, it has been known that Apple is now working on developing its own EV which the company has penned in for a release year of 2019.
And he quipped that a new pencil or bigger iPhone won’t be enough to keep Apple’s innovative reputation alive.
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Megan McClain, a former Volkswagen engineer with expertise in automated driving, and Vinay Palakkode, a graduate researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, a hub of automated driving research, have both joined the company, as well as a senior engineer from Tesla.
