Elon Musk said on December 22 that he contacted Apple CEO Tim Cook “in the darkest days of the Model 3 program” to discuss the possibility of a Tesla buyout by the Apple group, for “a tenth of its present value”.
What if Apple had bought Tesla? The hypothesis was considered by Elon Musk while the Model 3 program was skating. He got in touch with Tim Cook, the boss of the apple brand. “He refused to meet with me,” reveals the billionaire from Silicon Valley in a series of tweets referring in particular to information from Reuters concerning Apple’s ambitions in terms of autonomous and electric vehicles. Apple could then have bought Tesla for 10% of its current valuation.
Tesla shares entered the S&P 500 index of the New York Stock Exchange on Monday. It has taken more than 700% since the start of the year.
The start-up founded by Elon Musk now weighs some 600 billion dollars on the stock market.
Symbol of technological innovation and the shift towards electric vehicles for some, Tesla is for others a financial “bubble” on the verge of bursting, its valuation in no way reflecting sales and production potential considerably lower than those of the large traditional manufacturers.
The Model 3, a premium sedan, was developed from 2014 and released in 2016 by the electric car maker.