Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/22/elon-musk-tweets-he-asked-apple-ceo-about-buying-tesla-says-tim-cook-refused-to-take-the-meeting.html
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Why would Apple be interested in something that it would have to tear down and start over with? The value is in the brand/notoriety of Musk himself. The Dunning-Kruger is strong in that one.
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You think Apple didn’t/doesn’t have brand notoriety? As well as a rabidly loyal customer base who are unafraid to be early adopters? It wouldn’t be the first time they acquired a company and then either merged it in with current efforts and rebranded it as their own.
But yes, obviously they didn’t see the value in Telsa then.
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Of course Apple has a valuable brand. It also has products which at the time Tesla was not doing well at and as I noted, Apple might have been buying nothing more than the brand, having to burn the rest of it down to start over. Of course, if Apple had paid enough for the King of the Unforced Error to go away, we might have missed a lot of comedy gold. Not sure the brand commanded that much.
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The margin on a $1500 iPhone is comparable to Tesla selling a car for a million dollars. Because of this, Tesla (and car companies generally) are much less profitable than Apple. It makes no sense for Apple to buy a company which will forever be less profitable than their current operations.
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I guess, but according to the post, Apple hopes to have their own vehicle in 2024. So they must be willing to enter a market with smaller margins.
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It’s like I’m back in high school.
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I think it is the combination of the cult of personality that is Musk and also all the IP and potential disruption to the car industry.
The valuation of Tesla is nuts. They made less than half a percent of all cars bought last year, but their market cap is larger than all car companies combined. This is the final thing that made me think the next crash is going to be really, really bad.
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At the time, Tesla had always been losing money, and it still would be without gubmint subsidies
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iCar. It’s electric.
You know that’s the ad.
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I hadn’t compared the market caps, thanks for that eye-opener. I doubt the IP is worth as much as investors think: the main thing seems to be that the rest of the industry has yielded that entire segment to a startup with lots of $ and a very online CEO.
Ford or GM or Toyota could have made all-electrics years ago. Even today, they could retrofit electric into existing cars (cars last a long time and there are a lot of cars w common frames/drivetrains). Replace the wheels with hub-motors, fill the engine compartment w battery and power mgmt, instant all-wheel drive electric car at a scale Tesla could never achieve. Or other variants. I don’t care about the implementation, just the result.
Fact is, there are a lot of Accords and Camrys and Fits etc that could be migrated over w/o paying $30k for a car of indifferent quality.
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What really pisses me off is that the starry eyed dreamers on wall street have now made tesla a part of the S&P500, a very well tracked index. I have some money in a fund that tracks that index, and I don’t need elon’s stupid, stoned antics messing my shit up.
Yup, it’s bound to happen, and all the seemingly dumbasses sitting on cash right now will all look like the three wise men once that crash happens. Reminds me of a Spanish lesson I’m currently in on Duolingo. It’s an idiom that says something like “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king.”
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I mean, what would Apple do with Tesla?
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There is zero place for Musk there - him at Apple would be like gasoline on salad. The personality cult has a negative value in Apple-land.
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To put this a bit mildly, I don’t think Apple’s tolerance for risk and Tesla’s use the same measurement units.
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I have no idea, this is utterly uninformed speculation. But I would guess that there have been a lot of shortcuts in various places during Tesla development. Even if there weren’t, design-wise, Apple would just toss everything, anyway. Because they’re fucking Apple.
So really, what was there to buy?
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The fact that he had to ask them, rather than it being the other way around, tells you all that you need to know, really.
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weird flex but ok
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This. All of this. Elon is no Dr Dre.
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I’ve see a couple of Tesla on the road there, but now Fiat started to make all electric car, I’ve alreadi see six brand new 500 electric. Yes Is helping you could buy them directly at the factory.
Traditional auto makers are following more traditional building process, of course, like building the drivetrain and assemble it after. And yey, still have a radiator because the electronics and the engine are water cooled.
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Yeah, it is MUCH easier for the current automakers to swap in an electric drivetrain than for Tesla to go from hand assembling a few cars to mass production of automobiles. They don’t even know what they don’t know. There is no reasonable expectation that Tesla will manage to sell functional electric cars as cheaply as the current major automakers. So a market cap that can only be justified by the idea that they will actually REPLACE the major automakers is absurd.
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If I was the CEO of one of the most successful companies in the world I wouldn’t want to get involved with a man who calls someone a paedo on twitter and generally acts like a teenager either.
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They won’t and probably don’t intend to replace most cars. Tesla is a luxury car brand and will continue to be. That is a big part of its appear to the nerdy men (it is always men) who buy them. They are BMWs for wealthy nerds. More and more car manufacturers will be producing better electric cars in the next few years and even if Teslas are better the others will be good enough.
Tesla isn’t going to reposition itself as an every-person’s car brand to compete in that crowded marketplace. Instead it will focus on dominating the high-end electric car market which it may do successfully. Perhaps they will license some of their IP to other car manufacturers to allow them to expand their business beyond that.
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