Elon Musk May Have Almost Sold Tesla To Apple, But Tim Cook Didn’t Want It – SlashGear

In 2020, Musk Tweeted that during a particularly hellish phase (2017 into 2018) of its first mass-market EV (the Model 3), he contacted Apple’s CEO Tim Cook to see if the tech giant had any interest in buying Tesla. Why? According to an Axios interview, Musk claimed the EV maker was “bleeding money like crazy” and was literally “single-digit weeks” from going under.

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.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2020

The company needed immediate help, or Tesla’s death was imminent. The offer on the table to purchase Tesla was for “1/10” of the company’s value at the time. But Cook refused to take the meeting. According to Forbes, Cook’s decision cost Apple $640 billion. Tesla avoided the worst-case scenario and weathered the proverbial storm, but like all good telenovelas … a good subplot never actually dies.

In the summer of 2021, the book “Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk and the Bet of the Century” was released, written by Wall Street Journal reporter Tim Higgins. The author claims that not only did a phone call between the two CEO’s happen, but that Musk demanded a sale could only occur if he remained CEO, subsequently removing Cook from his position. Cook is said to have screamed an expletive and hung up the phone. You can’t make this stuff up. Or maybe you can because both parties have publicly stated they never spoke, met, or even wrote to each other about the subject.

Oh, but this is the soap opera that never dies! Cook and Musk recently got into a social media feud after Musk claimed Apple had removed most of its advertising from Twitter and threatened to pull it from its App Store. Cook and Musk met to hash it out, but will the truce hold? Stay tuned.