Did Elon Musk try to sell Tesla to Apple? Well, Tim Cook, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Apple Inc., said that he’s “never spoken to Elon. "Although I have great admiration and respect for the company he’s built," he added.

Musk had once claimed that he tried to hold talks about the possibility of selling Tesla to Apple. During the New York Times “Sway” podcast that was released Monday, Cook, while suggesting that a change may be on the horizon, said that Tesla has “done an unbelievable job of not only establishing the lead, but keeping the lead for such a long period of time in the EV space.”

Cook, who has been with Apple for 23 years, holding the position of the company’s CEO for almost 10 years now, also said during the podcast appearance that at 60, he doubts if he’d be in the company for 10 more years. “I feel great right now. And the date’s not in sight. But 10 more years is a long time and probably not 10 more years,” he said.

He, however, didn’t reveal much about the tech giant’s plans for the electric vehicle sector. “We'll see what Apple does. We investigate so many things internally. Many of them never see the light of day. I'm not saying that one will not,” he said.

Cook also talked about the controversial Parler social media app, blocked by Apple earlier this year. He said removing Parler from the App Store was a straightforward decision because they were not adhering to their guidelines. “You can't be inciting violence or allow people to incite violence. You can't allow hate speech. And they had moved from moderating to not being able to moderate. I'm hoping that they put in the moderation that's required to be on the store because having more social networks is better than having less,” he said.

The other topics that he broached upon were Apple TV+ and autonomous vehicles. On the role of social media in the attack on the US Capitol, he said that he was worried about its amplification. “The same tools that are used to target in advertising can be used for spreading misinformation or extremist views,” said Cook.

He went on to say that he was appalled by data theft and that they would improve the privacy policy over time. “Privacy policies have become these multi-page things that people just blindly click to ‘I agree’, so that they can go to the next screen page. A privacy nutrition label, much like a nutrition label on food, gives you some key information at a glance.”

Before signing off, the Apple CEO also talked about voting rights. “I think we're probably all having the wrong conversation on voting rights. We should be talking about using technology. How can we make it so simple that our voting participation gets to 100 or really close?” he said.

(Edited by : Aditi Gautam)

First Published:Apr 6, 2021 2:53 PM IST