Musk Declares Ceasefire in ‘War’ Against Apple

Elon Musk’s “war” against Apple has apparently halted, according to the Twitter CEO.

Musk mounted a campaign against the iPhone maker Monday (Nov. 28), saying the company had “mostly” ceased its advertising on Twitter and had threatened to pull the social media platform from its App store.

He said — via a now-deleted meme — that he was prepared to “go to war” with Apple over the future of the Twitter app.

By Wednesday, however, things seem to have cooled, with Musk posting a video on Twitter recorded as he met with Apple CEO Tim Cook at the company’s headquarters.

“Good conversation,” Musk wrote. “Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.”

PYMNTS has reached out to Apple for comment.

Ads account for nearly all of Twitter’s revenue, and Apple isn’t the only company reducing its advertising time on the platform. A number of brands — including General Mills and snack/candy giant Mondelez International — have either stopped or paused their ads since Musk took over as owner in October.

In early November, he announced Twitter had seen “a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers.”

Whatever the reason, Twitter has lost at least half of its top 100 advertisers, businesses that brought $750 million to Twitter’s notoriously weak balance sheet just this year.

In the middle of his conflict with Apple, Musk suggested that he could build his own phone based around Twitter, negating the need for either Google or Apple’s app stores. He’s also spoken of Twitter as the launching pad for “X, the everything app.”

And as PYMNTS noted earlier this week, making “Twitter into the X super app may be the only realistic way Musk, and his investor cohort, can manage to not lose their shirts on the $44 billion purchase of the platform,” although it’s obvious that much more work needs to be done.