Musk slams Apples aggressive recruiting and reveals bold plan to move AI to space

Elon Musk sayple Tesla workers when the iPhone maker was its own electric car, offering them twice their salary without even interviews first.

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

When the turned to building teams and hiring people, Musk how other companies tried to Tesla employees during the times. He pointed to Apple as one of the worst offenders when it its electric car program.

“When Apple had electric car program, they were Tesla with recruiting calls,” Musk said. “Engineers just 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 so that Tesla engineers started disconnecting their phones just to avoid hearing from Apple one more time.

Musk thie “Tesla pixie dust” problem. Other companies thought that if they hired someone from Tesla, success would automatically follow. Teslas in Silicon Valley made things worse because workers could to a new job without having to their families.

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

Musk admitte 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.”

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

Looking at artificial Musk the main is It used to be about software, but now its 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 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 air as reasonis makes sense.

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

Even with these challenges, Musk focused on more hardware “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.