Apple Will Buy Tesla Motors Because Nobody Else Can

On Friday, Jason Calacanis declared in a blog post that Apple will buy Tesla Motors in approximately 18 months for the whopping sum of $75 billion. Calacanis is not a shareholder in either company, nor does he have any inside information, but he gave 19 reasons why Cupertino will buy Elon Musk's electric car company. Here are a few that stuck out.

"Tim Cook is obsessed with renewable energy…"
What Tim Cook lacks in gusto and bombasity, a characteristic possessed in spades by Steve Jobs, he makes up for in humanitarian responsibility. Apple is alreadybuying $848 million worth of energy from a massive new solar farm near Monterey, Calif., while Tesla is trying to save the planet with the power of electricity, first in cars, and now in a battery that could someday power our homes. In short, Cook and Musk are very interested in saving the planet with renewable energy, and at some point, they'll realize that joining forces makes too much sense to pass up.

"Self-driving cars will be in the market in 7-10 years in a major way (you'll test one in the next three years, of course), which means that with Apple and Tesla's combined progress in this market, they could have the entire line refreshed and ready for a makeover for the coming driverless revolution."
If you said even a few years ago that the future landscape of automobiles would be driverless cars made by Google, it would have been hard to swallow. But the driverless car movement seems to be picking up so much steam, it almost feels like a forgone conclusion that in 10 year's time, a human operating a car manually will be a hobby for the rich to do on some getaway driving holiday. Now Apple appears to be in actual serious development of an electric car, and some speculate it will have self-driving capabilities. When you add Tesla to the mix, you've got three companies with the power, money, and creative innovation to completely change the auto industry. But for Apple and Tesla to compete with Google, they need to join forces. Tesla has already won the electric car revolution, but it needs Apple's cash to become a household name.

"Apple would need at least seven years to get a car on the road: three or four years to design it, followed by three to five years of building factories capable of any sort of modest capacity."
You don't need to be an insider to know that Apple doesn't introduce a product to the world until it fits its definition of perfection. Building a car is like nothing it has ever done before. While reports of Apple having a large team already working on a car may be true, it is already behind Google and Tesla. That's why I think that Apple's new effort to build a car is largely to signal to Tesla that it is serious about automobiles, namely Tesla's. And I wouldn't be surprised if Elon Musk is already getting metaphoric whispers in his ear in the form of updates and progress on Apple's car, whether they are "official" or not. Those are the benefits of being part of a mutual admiration society with Tim Cook.

"Elon Musk as the CEO of Apple? Wow. Doubt he would want to do it, but I could see him being the Chairman -- and that would be kind of special."
In late 2013, I wrote that Elon Musk was the closest thing we had to a modern day Walt Disney, specifically in the context of wanting to build components of cities of the future (hello Hyperloop). I used the original concepts for EPCOT as an example, and wondered if Musk would pick up that mantle. While being the CEO of Apple isn't exactly a step down from being the new Walt Disney, Musk is, dare I say, too important to run the day-to-day operations of Apple. That said, as chairman of Apple, he can not only help shape the future innovation of the company, but he'll have a much bigger soapbox to help shape innovation on a global scale. And to echo Calacanis' sentiments, that would be kind of special.