So, This Is What It Takes to Get Tim Cook to Say ‘F*ck’

Apple CEO Tim Cook is just not recognized for dropping his cool. He’s had stern phrases for Facebook, and other people attempting to make a TV present based mostly on Gawker for Apple TV+, however usually talking? Cook comes off as a genial, if surprisingly swole, gent—your healthful tech grandpa. At least, till you place him on the cellphone with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

The story goes that in 2016, Tesla was in some dire monetary straits. Cook obtained on the cellphone with Musk and proposed that Apple purchase Tesla. An intrigued Musk laid down one situation—that he’s CEO. Cook agreed, pondering he meant CEO of Tesla. And then Elon Musk, being Elon Musk, stated no, Cook didn’t perceive. He wished to be the CEO of Apple. It’s at that time that Cook reportedly stated, “Fuck you,” and hung up.

It’s a spicy meatball of a narrative and comes courtesy of an LA Times review of Power Play, a e-book by Wall Street Journal reporter Tim Higgins concerning the historical past of Tesla. It additionally contradicts a yarn Musk spun in late 2020. At the time, Musk tweeted, “During the darkest days of the Model 3 program, I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla (for 1/10 of our current value). He refused to take the meeting.”

That alone would make for tantalizing tech CEO he-said, he-said. However, the plot thickens. Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg journalist and writer of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, tweeted that Musk had informed him “I have never met, spoken to or even had written correspondence with Tim Cook.” Musk additionally tweeted himself, saying “Cook & I have never spoken or written to each other ever” earlier than relaying the identical story he tweeted again in December. In a dig, Musk additionally tweeted that “Higgins managed to make his book both false *and* boring.”

However, it does seem that each males had been current at a gathering with former President Donald Trump in New York in December 2016. Whether they spoke to one another at that assembly, solely a handful of individuals actually know.

Meanwhile, Cook himself stated in a New York Times interview earlier this yr that he had “never spoken to Elon, although [he had] great admiration and respect for the company he’s built.”

Amidst all this, Higgins also took to Twitter, writing that Musk and Apple had been given the possibility to touch upon the story and didn’t. “This anecdote comes from Musk’s own account of the conversation, according to people who heard the retelling at the time,” Higgins wrote.

Clearly, any individual someplace is mendacity about one thing—although frankly talking, the truth that this story is in any respect believable says quite a bit about everybody concerned. Neither Cook nor Musk is prone to stray from the official line, nevertheless it’s not unreasonable to suppose there is perhaps some stress between the 2 corporations. In current months, rumors have ramped up that Apple remains to be working by itself electrical automobile. In 2015, the 2 corporations had been rumored to be in “poaching war”, a lot in order that Musk talked smack to a German newspaper. “Important engineers? They have hired people we’ve fired,” Musk reportedly told Handelsblatt. “We always jokingly call Apple the ‘Tesla Graveyard.’ If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I’m not kidding.” Musk additionally took his fair proportion of potshots at Apple during an earnings call earlier this week and shortly after denying he’d ever met Cook, tweeted in support of Epic Games.

I dunno, Elon. You’re not precisely making it straightforward for everybody to imagine none of this occurred.