According to Bloomberg news, Apple is blocking Elon Musk's new revenue stream with Twitter and the confrontation between the two giants is heating up.
Taxes on the Internet
Specifically, Twitter's transition to paid services like what Elon Musk is doing, they still have to confront Apple or even Alphabet (Google) in the issue of fees and content.
The majority of Twitter users access the social network via iPhone and Android devices, and both companies have built a fee collection system for their marketplace apps. So when the Twitter Blue project comes into operation on November 29 with a price of 8 USD / month, Apple and Alphabet will probably demand a percentage of their fees.
With Apple, they will cut the fee by 30% and reduce it to 15% after 1 year of use. The number was 15% at the outset with Google.
Twitter currently has about 250 million daily users and if 1% of them, or 2.5 million people accept to buy Twitter Blue, Apple will earn an additional $ 72 million / year, while this number is 36 million USD with Google excluding other fees in Twitter.
This number is actually not much compared to the huge annual profits of the two companies, but it is an unacceptable number for Elon Musk, who is burdened with a loan interest of $ 1 billion / year. of Twitter.
As a matter of course, the battle between Elon Musk and Apple and Google will definitely break out. In fact, the Tesla founder once criticized Apple's fee policy, calling them "the new tax on the Internet" and saying that this fee is 10 times higher than they should be.
Even just a few days ago, Elon Musk lamented on Twitter that the fees charged by Apple and Alphabet are too high due to the monopoly of these two companies.
Bloomberg news agency said that a war with trillion-dollar companies is bad for Elon Musk amid countless bad news. As a reminder, Apple was willing to remove Epic Games' Fortnite game, which brought the company more than $100 million in fees a year simply because the company objected to the excessive fees.
So will the same thing happen to Twitter, when founder Elon Musk is also a CEO who opposes this monopoly of Apple's fee collection?
Content
Bloomberg news agency said there is one more factor provoking the heated battle between Elon Musk and Apple, which is content.
Since the Tesla founder took over Twitter, the social network has fired a series of employees responsible for reviewing false and hateful information. Even the managers for this segment were fired.
Even before completing the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk has made his position on freedom of expression and the consequences extremely clear. Bloomberg reports that the number of posts with racist, hateful, fraudulent or even pornographic content is increasing on Twitter as the social network's censorship team is in the middle of the process. empty.
Last week, when Elon Musk reinstated the accounts of former US President Donald Trump and singer Kanye West, the billionaire declared his support for freedom of opinion as well as opposing limited access to sources of information. .
In the event that Twitter cannot control the content, Apple and Google will certainly step in. Even the contentious ideological conflicts between Twitter and Apple can add to the tension.
New York Times expert Yoel Roth said that if the current momentum continues, sooner or later, a real war between Twitter and Apple will also break out.
Please be reminded that it is also partly because Apple tightens regulations on user information security that the world's largest social network Facebook has to redirect to build a digital universe in order to find new sources of revenue as well as avoid being dependent on it. 3rd part.
An even more obvious example is the Parler social networking platform, which was temporarily removed by both Apple and Google from the app market for violating content safety regulations. To be able to return, Parler had to strictly follow the rules set by the apple house, including removing posts deemed to incite violence.
Another example is former US President Donald Trump's Truth Social platform, which has been banned from Google's app market because it thinks it doesn't match the company's content standards.
However, many experts believe that Apple also does not want to anger Elon Musk, the richest billionaire in the world with famous brands like Tesla and SpaceX. That's not to mention Twitter's client base is also quite attractive, and if the conflict is not too intense, it is likely that the apple house will negotiate.
However, the media said that in fact, Apple also did not like Elon Musk. In July 2022, Apple CEO Tim Cook rented an electric car from Rivian, a Tesla rival, to attend a conference in Idaho that included many industry giants.
According to The Street, Tim Cook and other leaders at the conference drove Rivian's car to eat at restaurants afterwards, a move that is believed to be a mockery of the Tesla founder.