Musk Claims Apple Poached Tesla Engineers with High Salaries, Flooded Him with Daily Calls

During Apple's secretive and ultimately abandoned "Project Titan" car initiative, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that Apple had launched an aggressive campaign to poach Tesla engineers. According to Teslarati, Tesla engineers at the time were receiving recruitment calls from Apple nearly every day, with some being offered double their current salaries even without going through interviews. The relentless outreach became so disruptive that some employees eventually resorted to outright refusing Apple’s calls. Although Apple successfully recruited key personnel—including former Senior Director of Engineering Michael Schwekutsch—it did not prompt Tesla to file a lawsuit, in contrast to its 2020 legal action against Rivian over systematic poaching. Apple had originally aimed to launch a fully autonomous vehicle by 2028, but due to mounting technical and market pressures, it repeatedly revised its plans before officially canceling the project in early 2024, reallocating over 2,000 affected employees to other divisions such as AI.