Tesla, the maker of high-end electric cars, is hiring over 150 former Apple employees, according to a recent report from Bloomberg.
Tesla has hired more former Apple employees than any other company, including carmakers, according to CEO and founder, Elon Musk,.
Musk said that the reason former Apple employees are being snapped up by Tesla is because Apple and Tesla’s design philosophies are “relatively closely aligned”.
Tesla is at the forefront of developing innovative new vehicles.
Tesla has a workforce of over 10,000 employees, making the percentage of former Apple workers fairly small.
Musk said that Apple has tried to do something similar in poaching some Tesla workers, however, it has not been that successful. According to Musk, Apple has gone to extreme lengths, offering his employees $250,000 signing bonuses and 60 percent salary increases.
Adam Jonas, an auto industry analyst at Morgan Stanley, told Bloomberg that as cars become more like computers Tesla’s going to have an edge in hiring the right people and giving it an edge in the development of cars in the future.
Jonas said that “it’s almost an unfair advantage”, adding that “as software goes from 10 percent of the value of the car to 60 over 10 years, that disadvantage [for traditional carmakers] will intensify.”
“Elon has explained to me that it’s easy for him to hire someone from Apple, because when he does the interview process for a serious software engineer—a big human asset—he’ll meet with the person and geek out with them,” says Morgan Stanley’s Jonas. “They’ll like talk about nerd software coding stuff.”
A lot of Automakers are opening up new offices in the Bay Area to find new talent. Just last month Ford opened a 25,000-square-foot analysis center in Palo Alto to be closer to the tech industry.
“When you talk to people in Silicon Valley, there’s a totally different mindset. They look at Detroit as old,” said Dave Sullivan, an automotive analyst for research firm AutoPacific. “You don’t see that same innovation.”
