And from CNBC:
Early Uber investor says the troubled company should merge with Tesla
Angel investor Jason Calacanis, one of Uber's first investors, has a top pick to be the company's next CEO: Elon Musk.
Calacanis said Friday on his web show "This Week in Startups," that a tie-up between Tesla and Uber would give Uber the autonomous driving technology it so badly needs and expand Tesla's reach into many more markets.
Every couple years Calacanis would spread the rumor that Apple was about to buy Tesla or should buy Tesla or was thinking about Tesla and he'd get a 5% pop out of the stock. We were not impressed:
"If those two companies were together, they would beat everybody at transportation," said Calacanis, who backed Uber in 2009. "They're on a collision course for sure."
The only reason Calacanis is entertaining such a wild idea is that Uber is in utter chaos. It lost its co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick to a forced resignation in June and venture firm Benchmark, one of the company's biggest investors, is now suing Kalanick alleging fraud and breach of fiduciary duty. In court documents filed last week, Kalanick called the suit a "public and personal attack" without merit.
Uber, which was valued at about $70 billion in its last private financing, is operating without a C-suite and with nobody clearly in charge. Meanwhile, the company is locked in a court fight with Alphabet's Waymo unit that could thwart Uber's effort's to keep developing self-driving cars....MORE
February 2015
Apple Is Not Going To Buy Tesla (AAPL; TSLA)
At a minimum the instigator of the latest AAPL/TSLA rumor, Mr. Calacanis, should have lead his blog post with something like: "I was dreamin' when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray..."The link goes to FT Alphaville's Dan McCrum who laid out a straightforward "No one needs to buy Tesla" and got 61 comments to boot.
This is at least thefourthfifth time this oddity has made the rounds and if it weren't for the fact the linked piece does such a nice overview of Tesla we'd ignore it as we did the previous iterations.
And seriously, is it too much to ask for trigger warnings? Please, please Mr. C., include trigger warnings if you are writing something moronic.
TSLA up 30 cents at $204.07....
Our wrap-up:
...We've been posting on Tesla since before the 2010 IPO and as far as I can remember there were rumors that Apple would buy Tesla in Feb and Nov. 2014 and May and Nov. 2013.$336.74 last, down $10.72.
I may have missed some if they were going around earlier.
