Apple was once ‘carpet bombing’ Tesla with recruiting calls, per Elon Musk - 9to5Mac

Apple once had ambitions of building an electric car, and during that period, per a new interview with Elon Musk, the company was “relentlessly” trying to poach Tesla employees.

Elon Musk says Tesla employees were ‘relentlessly’ pursued by Apple recruiters

Elon Musk recently sat down with Stripe co-founder John Collison and podcaster Dwarkesh Patel for a lengthy, three-hour interview. Topics included space GPUs, xAI, DOGE, and a lot more.

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Apple is mentioned a couple of times, with the main occurrence centering on the topic of building a team. Musk talks hiring, training, and delegation when scaling a business, and covers some challenges he’s faced in that area.

Musk tells the story of Tesla once having a big target on its back as a place competitors would seek to poach employees. He specifically names Apple and its recruiting teams as being a big offender.

Here’s what he said:

Tesla had a further challenge where when Tesla had very successful periods, we would be relentlessly recruited from. Like, relentlessly. When Apple had their electric car program, they were carpet bombing Tesla with recruiting calls. Engineers just unplugged their phones.

“If I get one more call from an Apple recruiter…” But their opening offer without any interview would be like double the compensation at Tesla. So we had a bit of the “Tesla pixie dust” thing where it’s like, “Oh, if you hire a Tesla executive, suddenly everything’s going to be successful.”

Apple’s well-documented Project Titan efforts to build an electric car never came to fruition. However, it’s no surprise that the company put a lot of effort into recruiting from Tesla.

Musk adds he’s fallen into a similar trap when recruiting for his companies from a place like Apple. He says:

I’ve fallen prey to the pixie dust thing as well, where it’s like, “Oh, we’ll hire someone from Google or Apple and they’ll be immediately successful,” but that’s not how it works. People are people. There’s no magical pixie dust. So when we had the pixie dust problem, we would get relentlessly recruited from.

You can read the full transcript for the interview here, and the video is available below.