Elon Musk says Apple is the ‘Tesla graveyard’

Speaking to Handelsblatt, Musk revealed that Apple had earned the moniker after gaining a reputation for hiring people who had been fired by the electric vehicle manufacturer.

“They have hired people we’ve fired”, he said in response to a question about Apple’s recruitment of his former employees. We always jokingly call Apple the “Tesla Graveyard”. But just to make sure that his comments weren’t entirely dismissed as harmless CEO-style jostling, he added: “If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple”.

This prompted the interviewer to ask Musk, whose company had recently launched the Tesla Model X to considerable acclaim, whether he was taking Apple’s e-car ambitions seriously.

“No, seriously”, he continued, “it’s good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction. But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches”. But a few also have noted that Apple could be a serious rival to Tesla for cool tech factor.

An Apple auto whether it be electric or driverless will compete directly with the likes of Tesla and the traditional carmakers from BMW to Mercedes. With that said, Musk noted that cars are the “next logical thing” for Apple to move towards and investigate.

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.

Jamie Carlson, a senior engineer from Tesla, joined Apple’s Project Titan this August.

And he quipped that a new pencil or bigger iPhone won’t be enough to keep Apple’s innovative reputation alive.