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Elon is on the warpath again, this time Apple is in his crosshairs. He made a bunch of tweets this morning about Apple being anti free speech. This pertains to two possible developments: Apple possibly stopping advertising on Twitter. And Apple threatening action against the Twitter app, according to Musk (Apple has not confined either). [1] I don't see how these are related. Apple's cutting ad spending does not imply it being anti-speech or anti-Musk or whatever. But the timing is suspicious. Elon by going up against Apple has met his match. This not the NYTs, but a 2-trillion dollar company that is like an economy in and of itself. it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Apple has the power to create or destroy businesses , through its app or supply line .
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/28/musk-apple-app-store-twitter/
Edit: because twitter is fully privately owned, it does not have to report anything, incl financials, so it's impossible to know how it's doing, unless, I suppose, it goes bankrupt and shuts down completely, or if secondary analytic firms show a major drop in traffic, or employees with insider info leaking financials an other metrics. People are speculating about what will happen to Twitter, but we will have no way of knowing. It's step step above in secrecy than an already public company undergoing a new management; we're talking new management + secrecy.
Which isolates him more and more. He needs allies, not more conflicts. He should phone Tim Cook and cozy up to him and other powerful CEOs, not be a pain in the ass to them. He should court the White House and lobby his interests in Washington, not pointlessly antagonize politicians.
I think he is in an especially bad feedback loop on Twitter, with sycophants cheering his antics (shitposts), which will crash and burn him. Also his personality is thriving on adversity, he is amused by conflict, but that won’t make him friends or build coalitions.
Is Apple willing to fight?
Their advertising won’t come back. But I don’t see them removing Twitter app without a good reason (eg data leak of users, increased hate). Maybe Musk will do stupid subscription shenanigans to avoid the 30% cut in the AppStore/Playstore.
I don't think it works this way. Cozying with Tim Cook is not just about having a dinner and a few beers and cracking some jokes. I'd guess that it would involve concessions probably around censorship or letting some actors inside the company to guarantee compliance with Apple's interests or something like that.
Just an interesting sidenote, Tim Cook's net worth is apparently around 1.8 billion which is hundred times less than what Elon Musk has. But of course Cook is in control of company thousand times more valuable than his wealth. This is the problem I see in these top echelons of PMC. You have hired CEOs who enforce their own culture and habits that may be largely orthogonal to interests of companies and shareholders they manage. This is even more pronounced when we are talking about large financial corporations like Vanguard (managing $8.1 trillion) or Blackrock (managing $8.5 trillion) with their CEOs of Mortimer J. Buckley and Larry Fink net worth of probably in hundreds of millions up to a billion at high end. I am absolutely unsurprised if at certain points these professional workers kind of stop caring about money and may smell too much of their own farts, gathering in various exclusive locations like at Davos and coming up with ideas like ESG or other initiatives to basically utilize the company's power and resources they are hired to manage to leave larger imprint on society to satisfy their power trips.
I think there may be something rotten when it comes to modern corporate structure, it starts to resemble a government with quite a large difference between interest of managers (politicians) and shareholders (electorate). To me it resembles more and more structure of the past where kids of nobility got plucky jobs as governors of provinces or as army officers exactly to get status and power in order implement their own personal or family or wider network interests.
Agreed. A big problem in the modern corporate world is that CEOs and other leaders have basically no accountability. The fashion of giving them large golden parachutes or exit packages only exacerbates the problem. Why do you think Disney had to crawl back to Bob Iger to find a competent CEO?
I've done some wanton speculation about the reason CEO pay is so 'inflated' and it seems like there was previously a culture where internal promotion would lead to qualified candidates arising from within the company itself who were already deeply familiar with it's inner workings and deeply entrenched in the culture, and thus were at least partially motivated less by salary and perhaps something like actual loyalty to the company.
But now for some reason, such internal progression is extremely rare and when it's time to find someone with the demonstrated talent of running a huge corporation the talent pool is extremely small. So you're left to pick from guys who either already operated in the CEO/leadership role in a large company, or at least have some leadership experience, maybe in a smaller company and/or has the academic qualifications like a prestigious business degree.
My guess is that there's probably just fewer businesses being formed and grown to large size than there used to be. Thus, compared to the number of existing multibillion dollar companies that need leaders, there aren't so many candidates that a board of directors would feel they could justify to the shareholders.
Alternative explanation is that these large corporations are also existing in kind of incestuous environment. CEOs of various companies know each other and are sitting on boards of various companies together, or they can influence these companies by different means - such as controlling access to technology or market etc. Everybody knows how huge corporations can get what they want from government regulators and other actors, I see no reason not to think that they use similar underhanded tactics against or together with each other. I can easily see a conversation between Cook and Iger along the lines of: "You hire my nephew for this position in Apple and in exchange we will contract company of your nephew for that project at Disney".
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The theory I've heard is that the Biden admin was making some demands of him backed by threats of prosecution over some of his statements about Tesla self driving and such.
So the Twitter purchase and subsequent shitposting are efforts to build friends on the Republican side and make any prosecution look political.
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