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Tesla Poaches 11-Year Veteran At Apple To Speed Up Autopilot Tech Development

Left: (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images) Right: (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

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Eric Lieberman Managing Editor
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A longtime Apple executive is leaving the company at the end of the month and heading to Tesla to become its new vice president of autopilot software.

Chris Lattner, who since 2005 has worked with Apple, is most famous for creating Swift, the programming language for building apps on Apple platforms.

Lattner switching from Apple to Tesla goes against business magnate Elon Musk’s brazen belief that “if you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple.”

Employees at Tesla irreverently call Apple the “Tesla Graveyard,” according to Musk himself.

“Prior to Apple, Chris was lead author of the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, an open source umbrella project that is widely used in commercial products and academic research today,” according to an official Tesla announcement.

Lattner’s resume is fairly extensive, working on a multitude of projects for Apple, including iPhone and Mac technology development.

Lattner is set to take over for Jinnah Hosein, who was simultaneously serving as SpaceX’s vice president of software, as well as vice president of Tesla autopilot software. SpaceX and Tesla are both large enterprises founded by Musk. (RELATED: Elon Musk’s Failed Ball Of Fire Made Mark Zuckerberg Look Bad, And Zuck Is Not Happy)

Tesla’s autopilot technology, which hypothetically allows cars to partially function autonomously, was discovered to contain flaws after a vehicle using the much-hyped advanced technology crashed in May, killing the driver. (RELATED: Tesla Autopilot Technology Under Investigation After Fatal Crash)

Musk explained that the company urges drivers using autopilot technology to always remain alert. A few months after the crash, Musk stated that new updates to the autopilot technology would probably have prevented the original crash. (RELATED: Germany Forbids Tesla From Using Misleading Term ‘Autopilot’)

“We are very excited that Chris is joining Tesla to lead our Autopilot engineering team and accelerate the future of autonomous driving,” Tesla’s announcement concluded.

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