Elon Musk’s endgame by going after Apple

Yahoo Finance tech editor Dan Howley explains Elon Musk's criticism of Apple, particularly around its App Store, and the potential ramifications for Twitter.

Video transcript

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- Elon Musk has a new nemesis. It might be one that's too big even for him. Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley is here with more on the Musk Apple saga. There have been a lot of complaints, Dan, over the years about Apple from other companies. Daniel Ek for example, Spotify is piling on today, and he's criticized Apple before. That said, it's hard to see Musk prevailing here.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, yeah, it's hard to see anyone prevailing over Apple when it comes to the App Store, really. The big issue here is Apple and its control of the App Store and how it exerts that control, that the company basically is the de facto way that you can get your apps on your iPhone or your iPad. Sure, you can use a web browser. So you could use Spotify or Netflix or at this point Twitter in your browser.

The experience is going to be awful, though. It's not going to be anywhere near as good as an app. And outside of just Elon Musk and Twitter complaining about Apple, Microsoft has complained, Meta's complained, Spotify has complained, Netflix has complained. Basically, name a company, and they've complained about Apple and the App Store. By the way, it's just not just Apple, Google as well and their Play Store.

Although they do get a little bit of an out because you can install third party app stores, and then download apps that way. But they warn you against it. So it's kind of like don't do it, but maybe we'll use that as a way to not get as much criticism as Apple.

But I think the issue here for Elon Musk is he's talking about Apple threatening to pull them. He's talking about the 30% fee. And then he's going on about censorship, which from the standpoint of Apple, they've been criticized for that in other countries, specifically in China and aiding that kind of censorship. But in the US, they've done a good deal to protect user privacy. They went against the DOJ and the FBI as far as protecting user privacy even in cases of terrorism.

So you know, it seems as though that falls on deaf ears. I think really the issue here is whether or not the app would get pulled. Apple has pulled apps before because of content. They pulled Parler before reinstating it because they said that it wasn't doing enough to contend with threats of violence and illegal activity. Elon Musk wants to open up Twitter to all sorts of speech. Does that mean that it'll fall into that category? Will that happen? Will Apple then pull it?

I mean, it's really at this point it's Apple's game to play. Elon can just sit there and tweet away. I don't really think Tim Cook is losing much sleep over this, though.

- OK, so that was the next question, kind of. Is this having any impact on Apple?

DAN HOWLEY: I think if they did decide to pull Twitter, I mean, that would be a problem, right? And part of the issue here is the kind of politicians that Elon Musk seems to be courting with his statements talking about free speech and things along those lines, a lot of this has gone up to hate speech being out there, and can you have a platform that allows for hate speech and whether or not you should.

I think that when it comes to Musk and the people that he's talking to the different-- I mean, if you follow his Twitter feed, I mean, you're just like, come on man, we know the game you're playing now, right? You're trying to court these kinds of politicians so that if Twitter, Apple does do something, then you have them in your pocket then, not literally, figuratively to kind of say, look, we have this kind of backing.

Maybe we have to do some kind of antitrust move against Apple or something along those lines, right? But these are the same people that said they didn't want to do any kind of antitrust activities against the likes of Google or Amazon. So we're not going to see that, I think, anytime soon. He's just going to try to make Apple an enemy.

- Interesting. Dan Howley, thanks so much.