At the time, Apple was reportedly offering a few Tesla employees $250,000 signing bonuses and 60 percent raises to jump ship.
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“They have hired people we’ve fired”, he said in a recent interview with the German publication Handelsblatt.
‘We always jokingly call Apple the “Tesla Graveyard”.
As recently as last month, Apple executives met with officials from California’s automotive sector to discuss self-driving vehicles.
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. However while Musk doesn’t think too much of Apple’s hires, he does applaud Apple’s efforts at branching out to other products.
The cutting comments perhaps mark a change of heart for the entrepreneur who was rumoured to be in possible acquisition talks with Apple in 2014, Business Insider reported.
He added: “I’m not kidding”. And in case you thought Musk was just joking, he made sure we knew that he wasn’t. “You can’t just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a auto”.
The Tesla CEO went on to poke fun at the newly announced Apple Pencil and iPad Pro, saying that innovation in the form of a new pencil or a bigger iPad are “not relevant enough”.
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He said there are four billion dollar China-funded electric vehicle start-ups in the U.S. alone and import taxes are far higher in China than in the USA, putting Tesla at a disadvantage when it comes to exporting its cars to the eastern superpower.
