Things have not been going terribly smoothly for billionaire Elon Musk in the wake of his Twitter takeover, and the popular communication tool may very well find itself in a fight for survival in the coming weeks.
Musk purchased the application for $44 billion, after a lengthy PR campaign in which he declared his desire to “unlock” Twitter’s potential by embracing the tenets of free speech. For some reason, this rang alarms for the liberal left, who’ve been trying unsuccessfully to hide their reliance on large tech companies’ left-leaning censorship.
Now, as Musk takes Twitter back into unbiased territory, Apple is threatening to pull the plug on the app’s access to iPhones.
Twitter owner Elon Musk claimed on Monday in a series of tweets that Apple had threatened to remove the Twitter app from the App Store as part of its app review moderation process.
“Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why,” Musk tweeted.
There was more where that came from:
In other tweets fired off on Monday morning, he called Apple’s App Store fees a “secret 30% tax,” and ran a poll asking if “Apple should publish all censorship actions it has taken that affect its customers.” He also claimed that Apple has pulled most of its advertising from Twitter.
Apple’s App Store is the only way to distribute software to iPhones. If the Twitter app were pulled, the social network would lose one of its main distribution platforms, although the service is available for the web.
Musk has already faced a number of threats to Twitter in his brief time at the helm of the social media giant, and the eccentric billionaire has been forced to admit that there is a chance that bankruptcy lies in the platform’s future.
