I can't believe I just read all of these posts. Lockdown during the holidays is truly mind-numbing.
Anyways, it's wild how much folks are assuming about a few vague sentences that could accurately describe a huge swath of possible events.
Let's really look at Musk's tweet and give him the benefit of the doubt that all of his words were chosen deliberately. (And, I mean, yeah, maybe that's not a safe assumption, but there's nothing to analyze if we just say he could be lying or wrong...)
1. I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla
and
2. He refused to take the meeting
reduce down to
X. I reached out to discuss; he refused the meeting
There is no way that whatever sequence went down was that simple. Musk didn't call Cook's home line and leave a voicemail on a tape that went, "Tim? I've been trying to get in touch with you...pick up! I know you're there, Tim! You can't ignore me forever!"
In all likelihood, he had his people reach out to Cook's people. It's also pretty telling that he wanted to discuss, but didn't say Cook declined the discussion; he declined the meeting. For all we know there were multiple discussions between them (calls, emails, gift baskets with notes and fruits non-billionaires have never heard of, whatever), but Musk never made a tight elevator pitch to get into the actual meeting room.
When you're talking about a multi-ten-billion dollar acquisition, "THE meeting" is a big deal with lots of execs and lawyers from both sides. Cook almost certainly did not decline the meeting without talking to his people. He almost certainly had an internal Apple meeting, or many, to discuss if they actually wanted to have THE meeting. Cook might make the final executive decision, but the process would have been supported by a whole team of people who work at Apple because they know what they'e doing.
Cook's prowess as a supply chain guy inherently means he sees how pieces fit together—it's why Jobs chose him to run an insanely complex ecosystem—and one gets that way in a company made up of lots of different people by listening to lots of different people. It beggars belief that the man would be as dismissive as the critics here are assuming, and it's just petulance that Musk is trying to drop a mic by reducing Cook's response to a six word sentence. Like, would it change the tone of the tweet if Musk had added "Sad." to the end?
Now, in the abstract, was not buying Tesla an abject blunder? Maybe. But we really can't know right now. If the Apple Car flops and drags the whole company down while Musk rides his Tesla profits to Mars, yeah, sure. Perhaps there would have been no hiccups in the merger and Apple's value would simply be +$515B and Cook would hailed a genius for the purchase. Or maybe Apple would now be under the same anti-competitive scrutiny that Facebook is getting for the Whatsapp and Instagram purchases. It's pretty easy to imagine Apple, after acquiring Tesla, having a virtual monopsony in terms of both engineer hiring power and heavy metal demand. If Apple were severely punished for obliterating whole markets, the Tesla purchase would go down in history as the blunder. Between these extremes are a ton of meh outcomes where Apple is worth some amount more or less and dealing with multiple new headaches of some severity.
I dunno how the exchange went down in real life, and I'm not going to keep speculating on the what if's that will/would decide Blunder v. Not Blunder. My only point is that it's ridiculous to come to any conclusions about the mind of Tim Cook based on a salty tweet from Elon Musk, even taking it at face value.
Oh, and farewelwilliams, dude, if this is the hill you've chosen, we're not gonna be able to fit all your posts on the tombstone.
