Exclusive: Apple hires former Tesla VP and Aston Martin Chief Engineer for ‘special [car] project’
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has an affectionate nickname for Apple: The ‘Tesla Graveyard‘. “They have hired people we’ve fired,” Musk said. “We always jokingly call Apple the ‘Tesla Graveyard.’ If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple”. He made the comment after being asked about the so-called “poaching war” between the automaker and the consumer electronic giant following the start of Apple’s electric car program: ‘Project Titan‘.
We follow who’s coming and who’s going at Tesla pretty closely at Electrek and it’s clear that the two companies share a lot of former colleagues. Tesla’s senior engineering staff and leadership are full of former Apple directors and VPs, while the Cupertino-based company hired quite a few former Tesla engineers, but rarely any senior leadership… until now.
9to5Mac, in collaboration with our sister-site Electrek, has exclusively confirmed and discovered respectively that Apple hired former Tesla Vice President of Vehicle Engineering and former Aston Martin Chief Engineer, Chirs Porritt, to work on “special projects”, and we know that “special projects” is where Apple’s Titan car project lives.
