As we all know, Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter has been dramatic, to say the least. There have been mass layoffs, a botched blue check rollout, and tons of meltdowns by Musk himself.
And recently he’s picked a new enemy to fight: Apple. It all started with this tweet from Musk, complaining that the tech giant has mostly pulled its ads from Twitter.
He then accused Apple of making threats to take Twitter off its App Store.
This led to Elon complaining about the 30 percent fee that Apple charges on the App Store. While this has long been common knowledge, apparently Musk was surprised by this.
This led to Musk getting owned repeatedly in the replies.
But Musk wasn’t deterred and kept complaining about “censorship” in increasingly embarrassing tweets.
But this Twitter spat could have real-world implications. As the New York Times wrote: “With his tweets, Mr. Musk set the stage for a power struggle with Mr. Cook, who holds immense influence over other tech companies through Apple’s dominance.”
We’ve seen this before with tech CEOs like Tim Sweeney squaring off against Apple over their App Store policies.
For his part, Sweeney tweeted in support of Musk saying that “Apple is a menace to freedom worldwide” and that they “maintain an illegal monopoly on app distribution.”
We’ll see what happens but for now, Musk is pretty mad at Apple. But this could be part of a wider strategy. As the Times put it: “His business plan is predicated on shifting its revenue from a dependence on advertising to a greater reliance on subscription sales. But any new subscription revenue will be subject to Apple’s practice of taking as much as a 30 percent cut.”
h/t: Daily Dot