BI's source: "someone in Lattner's circle of developer friends"

There is nothing to indicate this isn't some random guy who's met Lattner twice and has no idea what he's talking about but wanted to feel special by being a "source" to BI.

Tesla doesn't strike me as secretive at all. Elon Musk is constantly tweeting about future plans, they frequently discuss new features before they're released, and they talk about new products and new product lines years ahead of time. For example the Model 3 was first talked about a decade ago, and they have explicit public plans (up to and including allowing customers to buy the option right now) for fully autonomous cars which will no doubt take years to actually come to fruition.

Tesla in many ways has the opposite problem that Apple does with secrecy: they talk so much about what they're going to do, and it doesn't always work out, so people start to mistrust what they say.

Of course secrecy is not the sole reason he left. Swift was developed 100% in secrecy for the first 3 years of its life, and even after that, Chris was able to navigate the open-sourcing culture shifts required of Apple to make that a reality, no small feat.

Though boring and lazy, it's extremely popular for the hivemind to take aim at the throne. Note it's why any article critical of Apple (or every damn blogger's tbMBP/macOS -> Linux article) goes immediately to the HN frontpage, while interesting technical discussion re: Apple products or news showing they're still the market leader remains barely discussed.

I also not convinced. Chris was with Apple for more than a decade. He must have adapted to the secrecy culture after so many years.

>why is he moving to Tesla which is equally secretive?

In what way is Tesla secretive? They make all kinds of announcements about things that aren't actually "real" yet.

It's not. the linked BI article speculates on other possible reasons.

Tesla is much smaller than Apple. They may be secretive with the outside world but not between internal compartments/silos.