Apple offered double pay to poach Tesla employees

Elon Musk says Apple went after Tesla workers hard when the iPhone maker was trying to build its own electric car, offering them twice their salary without even doing interviews first.

The Tesla chief made the comments during a recent three-hour conversation with Stripe’s John Collison and podcast host Dwarkesh Patel. The wide-ranging talk covered everything from computers for space to artificial intelligence and Musk’s work with the Department of Government Efficiency.

Engineers unplugged phones to avoid recruiters

When the discussion turned to building teams and hiring people, Musk brought up how other companies tried to steal Tesla employees during the carmaker’s best times. He pointed to Apple as one of the worst offenders when it ran its electric car program.

“When Apple had their electric car program, they were carpet bombing Tesla with recruiting calls,” Musk said. “Engineers just unplugged their phones.”

He explained that Apple recruiters would make opening offers worth double what Tesla paid, and they did this before even sitting down with workers for interviews. The constant phone calls got so bad that Tesla engineers started disconnecting their phones just to avoid hearing from Apple one more time.

Musk called this the “Tesla pixie dust” problem. Other companies thought that if they hired someone from Tesla, success would automatically follow. But Tesla’s spot in Silicon Valley made things worse because workers could jump to a new job without having to move their families.

Apple worked on building a car for years through something called Project Titan, but the company never actually made one. Still, it clearly put a lot of money and effort into trying to bring Tesla people over to its side.

Musk admitted he had made the same mistake when hiring for his own businesses. “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,” he said. “People are people. There’s no magical pixie dust.”

Plans to move AI operations to space

The talk also covered Musk’s plans for something he calls a “TeraFab.” He wants Tesla to build this because he thinks there are not enough computer chips being made to reach his goals. He even joked about his hands-on way of doing things, saying he would “smoke a cigar inside the fab” instead of following normal clean room rules.

Looking at where artificial intelligence is headed, Musk thinks the main problem is changing. It used to be about software, but now it’s about hardware and power. He said that in the next year, “people are going to hit the wall big time on power generation.” There will be more chips than the world can actually turn on and use.

His answer? Move AI to space. “In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space,” Musk predicted. He pointed to cheap solar power and no air getting in the way as reasons this makes sense.

Musk also talked about his current problems with hiring at SpaceX’s Starbase location in Texas. He called it the “significant other problem.” It’s hard to get married engineers to move to remote places where their spouses cannot find good jobs nearby.

Even with these challenges, Musk stays focused on making more hardware faster. “Whichever company can scale hardware the fastest will be the leader,” he said.

Despite the past friction over worker poaching, Musk ended on a positive note about technology’s future. “It’s better to be on the side of optimism and be wrong than on the side of pessimism and be right for quality of life,” he remarked.

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