Tesla’s effort to bring out its Model 3 brought the electric car company near to collapse in 2018. Now chief executive Elon Musk has divulged a new twist — he says he contacted his Apple counterpart, Tim Cook, to save his company.

“During the darkest days of the Model 3 programme, I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla (for 1/10 of our current value),” Musk said in a tweet on 22 December. But the Apple CEO, he said, “refused to take the meeting”.