Musk says he has never spoken to Tim Cook
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Elon Musk, Apple, and a Wall Street Journal reporter found themselves at the center of a social media beef that goes back to Apple’s potential acquisition of Tesla in 2016…and previews the electric vehicle fights yet to come.
It all started when a review of a new book about Tesla by the WSJ’s Tim Higgins revealed that Elon Musk told the CEO of Apple that he wanted to become the CEO of Apple.
The context:
- According to Higgins’s book, Apple boss Tim Cook and Musk were on the phone discussing a potential acquisition of Tesla by Apple. Once Musk lobbed the idea of him running Apple, Cook angrily hung up the phone.
- Musk denied the conversation took place. “Cook & I have never spoken or written to each other ever,” he said on Twitter.
Musk was clearly feeling spicy because later in the day he tweeted, “Apple app store fees are a de facto global tax on the internet. Epic is right.” He’s referencing the lawsuit filed by Fortnite developer Epic Games that attacks Apple’s meaty cut of App Store revenue.
Musk’s been at this for a while
On Tuesday, Musk turned an ordinarily dull earnings call for Tesla’s Q2 into a popcorn-and-white-wine event when he attacked Apple not once but twice. One of those moments:
- “Our goal is to support the advent of sustainable energy,” Musk said. “It is not to create a walled garden and use that to bludgeon our competitors, which is sometimes used by some companies.” And then he, and we can’t make this up, fake coughed and said “Apple” like a middle school student interrupting class.
Why would Musk be angry with a smartphone maker? Since 2014, Apple has been developing an autonomous, electric vehicle that would compete with Tesla, a project Musk has mocked for years. He told the German newspaper Handelsblatt in 2015, “No, seriously, it’s good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction. But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches.”
Musk also called Apple a “Tesla graveyard” where employees who couldn’t hack it at his company ended up.
Zoom out: As the most valuable public company in the world, Apple’s got a $2.4 trillion target on its back. Tesla joins Epic Games, Facebook, Spotify, and many other companies trying to chip away at its dominance.
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