This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on November 29th, 2022. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
Now that Elon Musk has woken up to Apple’s “tax,” Spotify gains a loud new ally. But Musk is playing a high-stakes game — and his newly acquired Twitter cannot afford to lose it.
Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk is a busy man. On top of owning Twitter, he is also a major shareholder and CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and the Boring Company. There are surely more companies and titles to add to the list.
Perhaps it is because he is so busy that he is only now discovering things that have been going on in the tech world for years.
Musk tweeted this week: “Did you know Apple puts a secret 30% tax on everything you buy through their App Store?”
Eh, yes? Everyone in the tech world knows this by now. It is exactly what the court case between Apple and Epic Games was about. It is the same issue Spotify brought to the EU with a formal complaint. It is the ongoing regulatory battle that has occupied regulators across Europe, the US and South Korea for years.
When Musk discovers something, it does at least tend to get noticed. And there is no harm in having an influential voice draw public attention to this issue. The 30 percent cut Apple takes from in-app purchases is genuinely significant.
But complaining loudly is ultimately just noise. For players like Spotify and Epic Games, having vocal support on these issues is no doubt welcome — but it is unlikely to change the outcome of ongoing legal processes.
Musk will probably also come to realise why relatively few developers actually pick a fight with Apple: it can be very expensive to have them as an enemy. If Apple decides that something in Twitter warrants closer scrutiny, the tech giant will scrutinise it. That process can be appealed — but only to another part of Apple. In practice, business-critical features can be kept off the market based on little more than Apple’s discretion.
For Twitter, this could be catastrophic. The platform is entirely dependent on users on Apple’s operating system, and uses the App Store as its most important distribution channel. If the app were removed — as Musk himself says Apple has threatened — it would be enormously difficult for Twitter to function as a business.
In the end, Musk is in a position where he needs Apple far more than Apple needs him. Picking this fight loudly and publicly may feel satisfying, but the leverage runs firmly in one direction.
