Musk Is Biting Off More Than He Can Chew By Picking a Fight With Apple

Elon Musk appears to be taking a page out of Donald Trump’s presidential playbook: If in doubt, pick a fight—with everyone. Having alienated a large group of Twitter’s advertisers, while risking Twitter's relations with regulators and simultaneously mocking the news media, Musk today started a public brawl with Apple, even threatening to go to war over its App Store fees. Musk may well be in the right in his complaints about Apple, as companies like Spotify and Epic Games would most likely attest. But being right won’t pay the bills.

Even if Musk could win this fight, which given the outcome of Epic’s court case seems debatable, resolving such a battle would take years. And Musk simply can’t afford a prolonged dispute with Apple while he is fighting on so many other fronts. Marketers defecting from the platform have depleted Twitter’s ad revenue, making it harder for Musk to meet the interest payments on his $12.5 billion in debt. His business woes would only be compounded by Twitter’s expulsion from Apple’s App Store, as that would handicap Twitter’s ability to sign up new users. As Yoel Roth, Twitter’s recently departed head of trust and safety, said in The New York Times earlier this month, getting kicked out of the Apple (and Google) app stores would be “catastrophic” for Twitter.