Warren Buffett: Apple Investing in Tesla a 'Very Poor Idea'

During a recent interview, Berkshire Hathaway Chief Executive and legendary investor Warren Buffett said that Apple investing in Tesla would be a “very poor idea.”

In a recent interview with Fox Business on Thursday, legendary investor Warren Buffett stated his belief that Apple investing in Elon Musk’s Tesla would be a “very poor idea.” Discussing Musk’s tweets in which he claimed to have “funding secured” to take Tesla private, Buffett stated that while anyone can make a mistake when speaking, “if you misspeak, you correct it immediately.”

And if you have a stock “trading like crazy,” minutes after you misspeak “you say I misspoke when I said ‘funding secured,’ I meant to say I really think I can get funding, something of the sort,” Buffett stated. When asked whether he’d support Apple purchasing Musk’s electric-car manufacturer, Buffett stated: “I’d support whatever Tim Cook does, but I think it’d be a very poor idea to get in the auto business.”

Buffett stated that manufacturing and selling cars is “not an easy business,” with a lot of competition and varying degrees of success year over year. “It does not give you a permanent advantage,” Buffett said.

A recent article from Wired noted that Musk will still have to answer for his tweets in which he claimed that he had “funding secured” to take the electric car manufacturer private — a claim which is now being questioned by an SEC probe despite Musk’s recent statement that Tesla will remain a public company.

The article states:

Don’t expect the feds to get less interested in Tesla just because it has decided to stay public. “I think the SEC’s interest in Tesla has been heightened, so they’ll be kept under close watch,” says Stephen Diamond, who studies securities law and corporate governance at the Santa Clara University School of Law.

In fact, the episode’s conclusion might get the regulators even more interested in pursuing Musk, or Tesla. “The regulators aren’t really impressed by the ‘JK’ defense,” says Peter Haveles Jr., a partner at the law firm Pepper Hamilton who represents financial institutions in enforcement actions. “There were two weeks of volatility in that stock. Because of the impact on the market, they’re not going to let go of this.”

During this whole situation, Musk has returned to attacking the British Thai cave rescuer Vern Unsworth, bringing up previous claims Musk made that the rescuer was a pedophile. Musk recently asked if Unsworth was innocent, why wasn’t he suing Musk for libel and defamation? Unsworth is doing exactly that, it appears that Musk just hadn’t “checked his mail.”