May 3rd 2016

Why Tesla is the spark that Apple needs

Apple’s dismal earnings announcement shows why it badly needs to rethink its innovation model and leadership. Its last breakthrough innovation was the iPhone — which was released in 2007. Since then, Apple has simply been tweaking its componentry, adding faster processors and more advanced sensors, and playing with its size — making it bigger in the iPad and smaller in the Apple Watch. Chief executive Tim Cook is probably one of the most competent operations executives in the industry but is clearly not a technology visionary. Apple needs another Steve Jobs to reinvent itself otherwise it will join the ranks of HP and Compaq.

That Steve Jobs may be Elon Musk—who has proven to be the greatest visionary of our times.

In the same period that Apple released the iPhone and successors, Musk developed two generations of world-changing electric vehicles; perfected a new generation of battery technologies; and released first-generation autonomous driving capabilities. And that was in Tesla Motors. In his other company, SpaceX, Musk developed a spacaecraft, docked it with the International Space Station, and returned with cargo. He’s launched two rockets to space that have made vertical landings back on Earth — one on a helicopter-like pad and another on a ship in the ocean. Musk is also developing the Hyperloop, a high-speed transportation system in which pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors. In discussions that I had with him in 2012, Musk told me that his ambition was to build a space station and retire on Mars. He wasn’t joking, I expect he will do this.

Apple has reportedly been developing an electric vehicle because it sees a car as an iPhone on wheels. It is conceivable that it will demonstrate something like this in the next five to 10 years. But Tesla already has this technology — and it is amazing. I have likened my Tesla Model S to a spaceship that travels on land. I consider it to be better than any Apple product — because it is more complex, elegant, and better designed than anything that Apple offers.

Apple should buy Tesla and appoint Musk as CEO.

Would Musk be interested in being part of Apple when Tesla is on top of the world? Tesla just received nearly $20 billion in orders for its Model 3 — a record for any product in history. Musk reportedly turned down an acquisition offer from Google in 2013 when it was on the verge of bankruptcy.  Why would he consider such an offer now, from Apple?

My guess is that he would do this — if he were offered the chief executive role. A combination of an operations executive such as Cook and a visionary such as Musk would be formidable. Apple’s vast resources would allow Tesla to scale up his operations to deliver the nearly 400,000 orders it has received for the Model 3. Tesla would be able to leverage Apple’s global distribution network and incorporate many new technologies. Musk would be able to pursue his dream projects while Cook worried about delivery and detail.

And Cook would get the visionary that Apple badly needs, someone who is even a cut above Steve Jobs. The markets would rejoice and take Apple stock to a level higher than anything it has seen before.  Consider that Tesla’s market cap of $33 billion is eminently affordable by Apple, which has reserves of more than $200 billion. And Apple lost $47 billion in valuation with its earnings announcement Tuesday, which is more than it would likely cost to acquire Tesla.

This could be a marriage made in heaven. We would get world changing innovations as well as our space colonies.

Below is an interview I Vivek Wadhwa with Tyler Mathisen of CNBC Power Lunch about this.

Vivek Wadhwa: Apple should buy Tesla and make Elon Musk CEO


For Vivek Wadhwa's site, please click here.

To follow Vivek Wadhwa on Twitter, please click here.


TO FOLLOW WHAT'S NEW ON FACTS & ARTS, PLEASE CLICK HERE!

Vivek Wadhwa is a Fellow at Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University; Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at the Pratt School of Engineering,  Duke University; and Distinguished Fellow at Singularity University. He is author of  “The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent”—which was named by The Economist as a Book of the Year of 2012, and ” Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology”—which documents the struggles and triumphs of women.  In 2012, the U.S. Government awarded Wadhwa distinguished recognition as an  “Outstanding American by Choice”— for his “commitment to this country and to the common civic values that unite us as Americans”. He was also named by Foreign Policy Magazine as Top 100 Global Thinker in 2012. In 2013, TIME Magazine listed him as one of The 40 Most Influential Minds in Tech.

Wadhwa oversees research at Singularity University, which educates a select group of leaders about the exponentially advancing technologies that are soon going to change our world.  These advances—in fields such as robotics, A.I., computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials—are making it possible for small teams to do what was once possible only for governments and large corporations to do: solve the grand challenges in education, water, food, shelter, health, and security.

In his roles at Stanford and  Duke, Wadhwa lectures in class on subjects such as entrepreneurship and public policy, helps prepare students for the real world, and leads groundbreaking research projects.  He is an advisor to several governments; mentors entrepreneurs; and is a regular columnist for The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal Accelerators, LinkedIn Influencers blog, Forbes, and the American Society of Engineering Education’s Prism magazine.  Prior to joining academia in 2005, Wadhwa founded two software companies.





  

Browse articles by author

More Essays

Mar 19th 2015

"Even siblings we don't see, who live differently from us, who move in their own world, may be shoring up our lives, our sense of family, our feeling of being at home in the world without our knowing it."

Mar 18th 2015
What qualifications do I have to review a restaurant, especially one with a Michelin star? None, really, except for the fact that I have eaten every meal out (I mean virtually every meal) for thirty years.
Mar 18th 2015

So a Rabbi and an Atheist walk into a bar.

Mar 17th 2015

Recently, a friend sent me a list of people who did great things when they were old. It was a friendly gesture, meant to support my belief that it is possible to age "successfully." The list included Bizet, Cervantes, Cezanne, Churchill, El Greco, Rembrandt and Tennyson. Quite a group!

Mar 17th 2015

Paul Cézanne famously declared "I seek in painting." He spoke of his art in almost spiritual terms, as a quest to reach the distant goal he referred to as "realization." In a letter of 1904, the 65-year old master wrote that "I progress very slowly, for nature reveals herself to me in very comple

Mar 13th 2015
Senator Inhofe (R-Okla.) pitched a snowball on the floor of the United States Senate last month.

This was his way of disputing that 2014 was the warmest year on earth and that human-caused c

Mar 11th 2015

Parasites, pedants and superfluous men and women.
Mar 8th 2015

The French writer Marcel Aymé once wrote a short story in which the population of a small town, starving to death, suddenly discovered that if they looked at a painting of food with enough intensity, they would feel nourished, as if they'd eaten whatever was depicted on the canvas.

Mar 7th 2015

Every year I hope that someone like you or I will be celebrated on International Women’s Day. But it never happens.

Mar 7th 2015
Every year I hope that someone like you or I will be celebrated on International Women’s Day.
Mar 6th 2015

Great experimental innovators are acutely aware of the costs of their particular form of creativity, as they spend long periods in pursuit of the elusive ideal of creating art that will be as powerful, vivid, and honest as reality.

Mar 1st 2015
The targeted, theatrically-staged murder of Boris Nemtsov represents both a culmination and  a turning point.  A culmination because it is impossible not to see it as a kind of horrific, grisly completion of a line of political murders perpetrated during Vlaidimir Putin’s tenure in offic
Feb 26th 2015

"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
John Adams

Feb 26th 2015

In a February 1941 editorial in Life magazine, Time and 

Feb 21st 2015

At a time when endorsement of Darwinism is reflexively identified with belief in evolution, it may come as a surprise that alternative accounts are gaining acceptance.

Feb 21st 2015
Philip Pickett, a very prominent conductor in the early music world, has been jailed for 11 years for sexually attacking two pupils and a young woman.
Feb 19th 2015

The 2016 presidential campaign is already upon us and the debate is heating up ov

Feb 12th 2015

Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we are at a transitional moment. For the past 70 years, the survivors of the Holocaust kept the memory of what had been done to them, to their families, and to European Jewry at the forefront of their society's consciousness.

Feb 12th 2015

Of course I like it when someone tells me I’m not old. But I always insist I am old, and that they are ageists, unwitting captives of Western culture’s misconception of the meaning of old age. ”You believe,” I say “that old means being decrepit, over the hill, used up, finished?