Elon Musk reveals Apple's car development era's "cash capacity" to poach Tesla employees: double salary and no interview

Tech News, February 6 — Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that during Apple’s development of electric vehicles (Project Titan), they launched a “crazy” talent war against Tesla.

In a three-hour podcast, Musk had an in-depth discussion with Stripe co-founder John Collison and podcast host Dwarkesh Patel. Besides exploring cutting-edge topics like space GPUs, xAI, and cryptocurrencies, Musk also reflected on the hiring challenges during company expansion.

IT Home quoted a blog post stating that he specifically mentioned Tesla was seen as a “talent gold mine” by competitors, with Apple’s poaching efforts being the most aggressive.

Musk vividly described the scene at the time: when Apple launched its electric vehicle project, its recruiting team carried out a “carpet bombing” of Tesla.

The level of harassment was so intense that Tesla engineers had to physically disconnect to focus on their work, even unplugging office phones. Musk recalled employees often complaining, “If I get one more call from an Apple recruiter, I’ll lose it.”

To successfully poach talent, Apple offered astonishingly high compensation. Musk revealed that Apple often offered double Tesla’s salary without even conducting interviews.

Musk called this reckless poaching behavior the “Pixie Dust” effect, meaning companies develop the illusion that hiring executives from successful firms like Tesla is like sprinkling magic dust—projects will instantly succeed.

Notably, Musk did not solely blame Apple; he admitted he had fallen into the same mindset trap. He confessed that when recruiting for his own companies, he also believed in the “Google or Apple halo,” thinking that poaching these people would immediately solve problems.

But reality taught him that “there’s no such thing as magical pixie dust.” Relying solely on backgrounds from big companies rather than actual personal ability often fails to deliver the expected business results.