Elon Musk definitely isn't afraid to speak his mind when it comes to other powerhouse companies in technology.
Back in October, when German publication Handelsblatt approached the Tesla CEO about Apple poaching employees from his company to reportedly work on its secret car project, Musk didn't hesitate hitting the tech company with a couple of zingers.
"Important engineers? They have hired people we've fired," Musk said at the time. "We always jokingly call Apple the 'Tesla Graveyard.' If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I'm not kidding."
He added: "Apple tries very hard to recruit from Tesla. But so far they've actually recruited very few people."
Close to five months later, though, maybe Apple can return fire.
That's because a 9to5mac.com story Monday reported that Tesla has successfully hired yet another Apple exec in Peter Bannon, who was reportedly with Apple as soon as earlier this year.
Tesla's hire of Bannon comes just a week after the electric car manufacturer hired renowned chip architect Jim Keller as its new vice president of autopilot hardware engineering.
The report adds that Tesla has overall been slowly winning this chess game with Apple over poaching employees and that Keller and Bannon were heads of Apple's processor development, having sparked the creation and strengthening of its A4 and A5 processors, which were used in iPhones from 2010 to 2012. Although Keller left Apple to work at AMD, Bannon remained with the company until deciding to jump ship to Tesla and be reunited with Keller.
While there's bound to be speculation about whether Tesla's hiring of Keller and Bannon spells the company jumping into processor development itself, it will be interesting to see how much longer this back-and-forth exchange between the automaker and Apple lasts ... and needless to say, how vicious the poaching could get.
That being said, Apple could always land heavy blows of its own by rolling out a capable car — whether electric or autonomous.
If the former path is the route that Apple goes, it would put the company's vehicles in direct competition with Musk's at Tesla.
Let the games begin ... well, they already have.
