It’s really tough to decide sometimes which meetings to take and which to refuse. Or just ignore.
But sometimes those meetings are big opportunities that we let slip through our fingers. And that’s exactly what happened with Apple in 2016, when Tim Cook ignored a request from Elon Musk to meet. Musk was going through production hell at the time and Tesla was a risk of running out of money.
That ended up costing Apple big time. From my story at Forbes:
Apple is a multi-trillion-dollar company, currently worth over $2.4 trillion. But it could be worth more than $3 trillion, if Apple CEO Tim Cook had decided to accept a meeting invite from Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
A new book has come out alleging that Apple and Tesla held acquisition talks which were scuttled by Elon Musk’s demand to be made CEO of the combined company. Elon Musk publicly denied this on Twitter today, but did add something interesting: Cook refused to meet with him.