Yesterday, Elon Musk claimed that Apple was unfair to X and Grok by not including them in the list of must-have apps on the App Store, threatening to take them to court. Musk's claim is very serious because it somewhat suggests that Apple is engaging in anti-competitive practices.
In a statement given to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg today, Apple denied Musk's claim. Apple said,
"The App Store is designed to be fair and free from bias. We feature thousands of apps through charts, algorithmic recommendations and layout lists selected by experts using objective criteria. Our goal is to offer safe discovery for users and valuable opportunities for developers, working with many to increase app engagement in a rapidly growing category"
At the same time, Elon Musk's dispute with OpenAI heated up yesterday after he and Sam Altman had a war of words at X. Altman said Musk's claim was absurd because the DeepSeek app managed to overtake ChatGPT on the App Store charts after its launch this year. At the same time, Altman said that Musk himself was proven to manipulate Twitter's algorithm to make his tweets more popular.
Furious with Altman's tweet, Musk accused the OpenAI CEO of lying because the tweet that started the war of words reached 3 million X users while Musk's number of followers was 50 times higher. Altman then fired back at Musk, saying that he failed because he "didn't have enough expertise" and needed a bot to increase his number of followers. At the time of writing, Musk had yet to respond to the tweet, perhaps because he had to seek treatment in hospital for severe burns.