With Lattner And Casebolt Additions, Tesla Continues To Poach Apple's Talent

Apple Inc. AAPL and Tesla Motors Inc TSLA have been quietly and not-so-quietly battling behind the scenes to employ some of the brightest minds in Silicon Valley.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk looked to gain the upper hand when he told a German newspaper that employees who "don't make it" at Tesla "go work at Apple."

Apple's alloy expert Charles Kuehmann joined Tesla in February 2016 - one month after Apple's chip architect Jim Keller was named Tesla's Vice-President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering.

According to 9to5Mac, the poaching continued in 2017 as Chris Lattner left Apple sometime over the past month to become Tesla's Vice President of Autopilot Software. Lattner, an Apple veteran with more than 10-years of experience, developed the Swift programming language and worked on the Xcode and App store architecture.

On Wednesday, 9to5Mac reported that Matt Casebolt, a high profile senior director of design for Apple's Mac lineup, left the company to become Tesla's senior director of engineering, closures and mechanisms.

Casebolt led the development of the MacBook Pro's new Touch Bar feature; Prior to that he worked on the "trash can" Mac Pro and designed the first generations of MacBook Air.