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Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk mentioned on Tuesday he reached out to Apple Inc Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook “during the darkest days of the Model 3 program” to focus on the chance of the iPhone maker buying Tesla Inc for a tenth of its present worth.
“He refused to take the meeting,” mentioned Musk, CEO of electric-car maker Tesla, replying to a Twitter chain which cited a Reuters story on Apple wanting to produce a passenger car by 2024 with a brand new battery know-how.
During 2017 and 2018, Tesla struggled to ramp up excessive quantity manufacturing of the Model 3 sedan, with Musk on the time informing traders the corporate was mired in “production hell” as a result of of issues with automated manufacturing programs at its battery manufacturing facility in Reno, Nevada.
However, Tesla overcame the issues and has since racked up a string of quarterly income. The electrical automaker turned one of essentially the most precious firms to be part of the S&P 500 when it turned half of the extensively adopted inventory index on Monday.
Shares of Tesla, nonetheless, ended 6.5 p.c decrease in its S&P 500 debut, amid information of potential competitors from Apple.
Apple’s automotive efforts, often known as Project Titan, have proceeded erratically since 2014 when it first began to design its personal car from scratch.
Central to the corporate’s technique for auto manufacturing is a brand new battery design that would “radically” scale back the associated fee of batteries and improve the car’s vary.
In the identical Twitter chain, Musk mentioned “monocell”, which Apple plans to use in its design, “is electrochemically impossible as max voltage is ~100X too low” except they’re bonded collectively.
Strange, if true.
– Tesla already makes use of iron-phosphate for medium vary automobiles made in our Shanghai manufacturing facility.
– A monocell is electrochemically unattainable, as max voltage is ~100X too low. Maybe they meant cells bonded collectively, like our structural battery pack?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2020
Apple declined to remark whereas Tesla didn’t instantly reply to a Reuters request for remark.
© Thomson Reuters 2020
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(This story has not been edited by Newslivenation employees and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)