Elon Musk says that he wanted Apple to buy Tesla during the company's 'darkest days,' but Tim Cook wouldn't take the meeting

Elon Musk once hoped Apple would acquire Tesla, but Apple CEO Tim Cook wouldn't meet with him, he said in a tweet on Tuesday.

"During the darkest days of the Model 3 program, I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla (for 1/10 of our current value)," Musk wrote. "He refused to take the meeting."

Tesla's market capitalization closed at $607 billion on Tuesday — using that to complete a rough calculation, Musk may have been planning to offer to sell the company for about $60 billion.

A spokesperson for Apple did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Musk was likely referring to a period in either 2016 or 2017 when Tesla was working on the Model 3, the electric car-maker's entry-level sedan. Musk has spoken in the past about issues surrounding Model 3 production, recently tweeting that the company was a month away from bankruptcy at one point. He described the process as "production and logistics hell."

Model 3 production was a slow process that required Tesla to fly in parts from Germany and set up an additional assembly line outside of the company's Fremont, CA plant in an effort to speed up production. At one point, Musk was sleeping on the floor at the factory and wearing the same clothes several days in a row because he wanted his "circumstances to be worse than anyone else at the company," he said in 2018.

Musk posted the tweet in response to news that Apple is planning to build its own electric, self-driving car by 2024. Apple has reportedly had a car project in the works since 2014 — known as Project Titan — but its efforts have been slow and at some points, even paused.
Now, Apple reportedly hopes to launch its own passenger vehicle for consumers, which would compete directly with Tesla, versus plans from competitors like Waymo, which plans to build robo-taxis.