Elon Musk’s controversial management of Twitter, now rebranded X under the tycoon, already led Apple to cut its advertising spending once.
It may not be the last time either after Musk’s recent attack on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish advocacy group combatting hate speech, that has the Tesla CEO fighting off accusations he’s an anti-Semite.
“Twitter is an important property,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told CBS Sunday Morning, citing its role as a town square for public discourse, but "there are also some things about it I don't like."
Cook, himself a member of an often persecuted minority as the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company, called anti-Semitism flat out “abhorrent” and had no place anywhere, least of which in the public domain.
Asked whether Apple should therefore stop its advertising on Twitter, Cook replied: “It’s something we constantly ask ourselves.”
It wouldn’t be the first time that Cook and Musk clashed.
In June of last year, several advocacy groups launched a coordinated campaign to prevent the platform from falling into Musk’s hands, fearing he would remove many of the safeguards put in place to minimize the reach of the more incendiary forms of hate speech.
When he finally did take over Twitter, its biggest advertiser, Apple, pulled its spending and at one point there was even unsubstantiated rumors it would ban the platform from the App Store. Musk then accused the tech giant of opposing the cause of free speech.
Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022
Towards the end of the year a truce was finally reached between the two CEOs, but it appears Apple’s concerns haven’t entirely abated.
That may be the case, because Musk has since recently accused the ADL, which awarded Cook in 2018 for his efforts to combat bigotry, of being inadvertently responsible for the very anti-Semitism it claims to combat.
He also claimed it was directly responsible for a minimum of $4 billion in damages incurred by Twitter—a sum that if ever awarded by a court could spell the end for the non-profit.
Musk and Soros
Cook’s warning on Sunday came just as Musk lashed out again at Jewish billionaire George Soros.
In May, Musk compared him to comic book supervillain Magneto, since both survived the Nazi holocaust only to grow to “hate humanity”. Days earlier regulatory filings revealed the wealthy speculator had dumped his entire stake in Tesla.
The Soros organization appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2023
More recently, in a Sunday response to a post on X claiming the Democrat megadonor is to blame for a record 5,000 migrants from Africa arriving in Italy’s Lampedusa island in one day, Musk—who hails from the continent—continued to paint Soros in the same cartoonishly evil terms that has many Jews on both the left and right upset.
“The Soros organization appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization,” Musk replied this weekend in a post that got over 22,000 likes and 1.6 million views.
