Apple’s Bold Move: Doubling Salaries to Lure Tesla’s Top Talent in Tech’s Latest Talent War
Tech's talent wars just escalated—dramatically. Apple isn't just recruiting; it's deploying a financial sledgehammer to crack open Tesla's engineering fortress. The playbook? Simple, aggressive, and costly: offer double the pay.
The Silicon Valley Shake-Up
Forget subtle LinkedIn messages and competitive benefits packages. This is a direct assault on the core of Tesla's innovation engine. By targeting specialized employees—think battery systems, autonomous driving, and advanced manufacturing—Apple signals its ambitions stretch far beyond consumer gadgets. It's a power move that redefines 'competitive compensation' in an industry already known for lavish perks.
Why the Premium Price?
The math is brutal for Tesla. When a trillion-dollar giant decides it needs your team's expertise, it can simply outspend you. Apple's war chest allows it to absorb staggering talent-acquisition costs that would cripple most firms. It's a transfer of wealth and intellectual property, funded by iPhone profits and executed with corporate precision. A classic case of capital being deployed to shortcut years of R&D—Wall Street would be proud of the efficiency, if not the ethics.
The Ripple Effect
This isn't just an HR story. It's a market signal. When giants clash over human capital at this level, it validates the skyrocketing value of deep tech skills. It also exposes the fragility of loyalty in an ecosystem driven by disruption. For the employees, it's a life-changing payday. For the industry, it's a new benchmark in the cost of innovation.
One cynical finance jab? It's the ultimate arbitrage play: using historically undervalued (by tech mega-cap standards) compensation packages at one company to buy proven talent at twice the price, betting the acquired brainpower will generate multiples in future value. A human capital leveraged buyout, if you will.
The takeaway? The battle for the future isn't just fought with code and prototypes. It's fought with bank transfers. And right now, Apple's checkbook is looking mightier than Tesla's mission.
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.
Join a premium crypto trading community free for 30 days - normally $100/mo.
