A few years ago, when Tesla was struggling through the Model 3 program and production, Apple refused a meeting to discuss potentially buying the electric vehicle maker for around US$60 billion, Tesla’s chief executive Elon Musk said on Tuesday.
“During the darkest days of the Model 3 program, I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla (for 1/10 of our current value). He refused to take the meeting,” Musk tweeted on Tuesday, replying to an exchange on Twitter discussing reports that Apple targets to produce a consumer EV in 2024.
The 1/10 of Tesla’s current value – which was about US$606 billion early on Wednesday – Musk is referring to suggests that he had put a US$60-billion price tag on Tesla when he tried to approach Apple’s chief executive Cook.
In 2017 and 2018, Tesla was going through “production hell,” as Musk had put it, during its efforts to ramp up the production of the Model 3. Musk was sleeping at the factory in an attempt to fix the production woes at Tesla’s mass-market Model 3, the EV maker burned a lot of cash, while analysts were saying that the company might have to tap capital markets sooner rather than later to raise much-needed financing.
Two years later, Tesla is consistently posting quarterly profits and joined this week the S&P 500 index.
Apple, for its part, is reportedly planning to manufacture an electric passenger vehicle with its own breakthrough battery technology in 2024, sources with knowledge of the plans told Reuters this week, in what could be a revival of the iPhone maker’s car project ambitions.
Apple targets a mass passenger EV with a battery technology expected to “radically” cut the battery costs and boost the range, a source who has seen the battery design of the cell phone maker told Reuters.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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