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REUTERS: Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk said Tuesday that he contacted Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook “during the darkest days of the Model 3 program” to discuss the possibility of the iPhone maker acquiring Tesla Inc. for a tenth of its current value. .
“He declined to participate in the meeting,” said Musk, chief executive of electric car maker Tesla, in response to a Twitter feed that cited a Reuters story about Apple seeking to produce a passenger car by 2024 with new technology. Of battery.
During 2017 and 2018, Tesla struggled to increase high-volume production of the Model 3 sedan, and Musk at the time informed investors that the company was mired in “production hell” due to problems with automated production systems in its battery factory in Reno, Nevada. .
However, Tesla overcame the problems and has since racked up a string of quarterly earnings. The electric car maker became one of the most valuable companies to join the S&P 500 when it became part of the widely followed stock index on Monday.
Tesla shares, however, closed 6.5 percent lower on its S&P 500 debut, amid news of potential competition from Apple.
Apple’s automotive efforts, known as Project Titan, have played out unevenly since 2014, when it began designing its own vehicle from scratch.
Central to the company’s strategy for car production is a new battery design that could “radically” reduce the cost of batteries and increase the vehicle’s range.
On the same Twitter feed, Musk said that “single cell”, which Apple plans to use in its design, “is electrochemically impossible as the maximum voltage is ~ 100 times too low” unless they are linked.
Apple declined to comment, while Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
(Reporting by Chavi Mehta in Bengaluru and Joe White in Detroit; Edited by Krishna Chandra Eluri)
