Elon Musk once said that Apple is a "Tesla graveyard" of former employees. In making this statement, he was stating that former Tesla Motors employees who failed would go to work for Apple. This might have been one of the causes for the "Tesla vs. Apple" poaching war. However, considering that they have another addition to their pool of former Apple employees, Chris Lattner, does this mean that he is now eating his words?
Tesla's new Vice President of Autopilot. Lattner's engineering excellence is known far and wide. He was previously with Apple for 11 years. During his stay there he was responsible for creating programming language "Swift." The language is used to build Apple platform apps on Linux systems.
The former Apple employee was also the lead author of the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure. The infrastructure is an open source umbrella project used mainly in academic research and commercial products.
Lattner is now the current Vice President of Autopilot at Tesla Motors. But he's not the only former Apple employee who has been poached by Tesla.
Tesla Motors' Former Apple Employee Roster. The Silicon Valley electronic vehicle manufacturer has hired several other Apple alumni during the "Tesla vs. Apple" poaching conflict. Elon Musk has already Matt Casebolt, Doug Field, David Erhart, and Sarah O'Brien.
Matt Casebolt was a former high-profile Senior of Director of Design at Apple. He was even the Design Director of the Macbook Pro. He also worked on the design of the first generations of MacBook Air. In fact, he is listed on at least 52 of Apple's patents. He is now the Senior Director of Engineering, Closures & Mechanisms at Tesla.
Doug Field is currently Tesla's Sr. VP of Vehicle Engineering. He was Apple's former VP of Mac Hardware Engineering.
David Erhart is Tesla's Senior Director of Reliability and Test. He had a similar post at Apple for 3 years as the Director of Reliability Engineering.
Sarah O'Brien used to be connected with Apple's PR department. Most recently, she was working on communications for the iPhone and Apple Watch. In September of last year, she became Tesla's Senior Director of Communications.
For their part in the "Tesla vs. Apple" poaching battle, Apple has also hired some of Tesla's former engineers. Chris Porritt, Tesla's former VP of Vehicle Engineering, is one of the few examples of senior leadership that moved to Apple.
The Future of Tesla Motors. Considering Apple's track record for successful and revolutionary industry changing pieces of technology, Elon Musk did a good job in recruiting a lot of former Apple employees. Chris Lattner is the latest addition to Tesla Motors, who will be next? For now, the world will focus on Tesla's latest 'HW2 Autopilot update'.
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