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Journalism of Courage
A day after Elon Musk said xAI, the AI startup behind Grok would take legal action against Apple for violating antitrust regulations, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hit back at Musk, claiming that the billionaire is manipulating X “to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like.”
Altman’s reply comes to Musk’s recent post on X (formerly Twitter), where he claimed that Apple had made it “impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store.”
The OpenAI CEO also shared a link to an article on Platformer titled “Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first.” The latest clash is another addition to a long list of public feuds between the two tech leaders, who have previously publicly disagreed over things like AI safety and business strategy ever since Musk stepped down from OpenAI’s board back in 2018. Following their argument, Musk even attempted to acquire OpenAI’s non-profit arm, but ultimately failed to do so.
While Musk did not provide any evidence to support his claim that Apple violated antitrust regulations, the multi-billionaire did say that Apple was refusing to put X or Grok in App Store’s “Must have” section despite the social media platform being the number one news app in the world and Grok holding on to the number five spot amongst all apps.
In case you are wondering, OpenAI’s ChatGPT currently holds the top position in the App Store’s “Top Free Apps” section for iPhones in the United States, while Grok is ranked fifth. Musk’s claim comes after a United States judge ruled that Apple had indeed violated a court order, which asked the tech giant to allow competition in the App Store, and initiated a criminal contempt investigation.
After the Altman-Musk standoff, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney also commented on the matter, asking Apple if they are ready to feature Fortnite on the App Store. In response, Apple enthusiast and blogger John Gruber said claimed that Apple has never hosted an app or game that was fined for “defrauding children out of hundreds of millions of dollars.”
As it turns out, that’s not true, as the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had previously slapped a $32.5 million fine on the tech giant to “provide full refunds to consumers” to settle a complaint where it had billed consumers for millions of dollars of charges incurred by children in kids’ mobile apps without their parents’ consent.
Earlier this year, in April, the Cupertino-based tech giant was also slapped with a 500 million euro fine by the European Union’s antitrust body, where it claimed Apple had put “technical and commercial restrictions”, which prevented app developers from redirecting to alternate billing systems outside the App Store.
