Washington DC : A titanic struggle for technological, social, economic & political primacy is brewing between two storied American companies, Twitter & Apple. The clash could accelerate in Tesla, primarily an electric automotive company, making smartphones to challenge Apple’s domination in the field & Apple producing an iCar to drive Tesla off the road.
Outlines for such an emerging scenario were drawn on Monday when Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who recently bought Twitter, unloaded against Apple in a series of tweets, accusing it of planning to jettison the social media platform from its App Store, thereby “censoring free speech”. ”Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its Store, but won’t tell us why”, Musk said in one tweet although there was no formal announcement to that effect from Apple. He then added ,” Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?” followed by “Did you know Apple puts a secret 0% tax on everything you buy through their App Store?”
Later on Wednesday Elon Musk tweeted that after speaking with Apple Inc. Chief Executive Tim Cook, the misunderstanding regarding Twitter possibly being removed from the App Store had been cleared up. Musk, a multibillionaire CEO of Tesla Inc. and Twitter Inc., was clear that Apple never considered doing so, the CEO wrote in a tweet.
In a series of tweets published on Monday, Musk claimed that Apple had threatened to remove Twitter from its app store without providing any explanation. He also claimed that the company had halted advertising on the social media network. In a subsequent post, he had included Cook’s Twitter handle and questioned, “What’s going on here?”
Requests for comment on Musk’s most recent tweet from Twitter and Apple were not immediately met with a response. Apple hasn’t publicly reacted to Musk’s earlier tweet.
The up to 30% commission Apple charges software developers for in-app purchases was one of the complaints Musk tweeted about on Monday. Musk posted a meme implying he was prepared to “go to war” with Apple rather than pay the commission.
