Musk says Apple passed on Tesla acquisition three years ago
Tesla got near bankruptcy as it ramped up Model 3 production in 2017 and 2018. …
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A few years ago, Elon Musk tried to interest Apple CEO Tim Cook in buying Tesla, Musk said in a Tuesday tweet. “He refused to take the meeting,” Musk added.
According to Musk, this occurred in the “darkest days of the Model 3 program”—most likely sometime in late 2017 or early 2018. Musk recently revealed that at one point early in the Model 3 manufacturing process, Tesla was “about a month” away from bankruptcy.
“The Model 3 ramp was extreme stress & pain for a long time — from mid 2017 to mid 2019,” Musk wrote in November. “Production & logistics hell.”
While the Model 3 was not Tesla’s first car, it was the company’s first attempt to build a mass-market vehicle—one that could sell for less than $40,000 and therefore win hundreds of thousands of customers every year. While the car was cheaper, the equipment required to manufacture it at a larger scale was more expensive than Tesla’s previous production lines.
Musk had an ambitious plan to automate the Model 3 production process, using robots for tasks that were traditionally done by human workers. But things didn’t work out the way Musk hoped they would. Building the necessary robots was more difficult and expensive than expected. Some didn’t work right. So Tesla was ultimately forced to scale back its automation plans and build a more
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