Tesla billionaire Elon Musk mentioned he met with Apple CEO Tim Cook dinner on Wednesday, including one other chapter to a wierd and contentious week between the 2 tech titans.
“Thanks @tim_cook for taking me round Apple’s lovely HQ,” Musk wrote in a tweet, together with a video of a big pond, with two shadows standing within the foreground.
He adopted it up with one other tweet just some hours later.
“Good dialog. Amongst different issues, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter probably being faraway from the App Retailer. Tim was clear that Apple by no means thought-about doing so.”
The 2 peaceable tweets capped off several more aggressive missives from Musk, who repeatedly known as out Apple this week, and at occasions Cook dinner particularly, over claims that the tech big stopped promoting on Twitter, threatened to take away it from its app retailer, and overcharged firms. (Each Apple and Twitter didn’t instantly reply to Fortune’s request for remark.)
On Monday, Musk tweeted that Apple had lower off most of its promoting on Twitter. Apple was the highest advertiser on Twitter within the first quarter of this yr, spending $48 million on advertisements, according to the The Washington Put up. Apple advertisements accounted for 4% of Twitter’s income that quarter.
“Do they hate free speech in America?” He wrote, including, “What’s occurring right here @tim_cook?”
Twitter has misplaced a number of main advertisers since Musk took over the corporate final month, together with Pfizer, Volkswagen, and Chipotle. Current reporting from tech newsletter Platformer revealed that weekly advert bookings for the corporate are down almost 50%, and income in Europe, the Center East, and Africa is down 15%.
However advertising is just one part of Musk’s downside with Apple. He claimed in one other Monday tweet that the corporate “threatened to withhold” Twitter’s app from its app retailer, however “gained’t inform us why.”
Advertisers and firms have been distancing themselves from Musk’s Twitter since he started implementing adjustments on the firm earlier this month, largely in response to Musk’s determination to cut most of the platform’s content moderation team and the ensuing rise of hate speech noticed on the positioning.
Getting kicked out of the app retailer can be a serious blow to the social media platform, which is already enduring a interval of utmost tumult. Musk has to date laid off round 50% of Twitter’s staff in an effort to chop prices, with hundreds resigning in latest weeks as the brand new CEO brings his trademark “hardcore” work ethic and administration fashion to the corporate.
Musk went on to denounce Apple’s “secret 30% tax on all the things” in yet one more tweet on Monday, referring to the proportion of earnings that the corporate takes from app retailer gross sales. Musk could have additionally delayed relaunching the platform’s Twitter Blue subscription service in order that the function may very well be re-tooled as an in-app buy, and keep away from Apple’s charge.
The charge Apple receives from app downloads is well-known amongst tech firms, with Spotify and Facebook mum or dad Meta having criticized Apple for the proportion lower up to now.
Epic Video games, the writer of fashionable videogame Fortnite, even took Apple to court final yr over the embedded charge. Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney has criticized Apple’s mannequin as a “monopoly” and lately sided with Musk on the problems between Apple and Twitter.
“Apple is a menace to freedom worldwide,” Sweeney wrote on Twitter this week. “They keep an unlawful monopoly on app distribution, they use it to regulate American discourse, they usually’re endangering protesters in China by storing delicate buyer information in a state-owned information heart.”
Billing startup Paddle additionally took Apple to court last year over its cost system, and its CEO Christian Owens lately welcomed Musk as an ally of their case. “It factors to how egregious the 30% charge is. I’m glad Elon is within the combat,” Owens told Insider this week.
A pondside assembly at Apple HQ will doubtless not be sufficient for Musk to just accept Apple’s obtain charge, though Owens and different CEOs dissatisfied with Apple may quickly discover him to not be probably the most dependable ally.
Nov. 30, 2022: This story has been up to date to incorporate an extra tweet from Elon Musk.
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