William Gallagher
Controversial Twitter CEO has again spoken out about Apple and advertising, but this time to publicly thank the firm for sticking with the platform.
Along with many advertisers, Apple reportedly cut its ad spend on Twitter following Elon Musk's taking over as CEO. While existing commitments may actually have meant that Apple did not spend less on Twitter advertising at the time, it was still enough to send Musk raging.
Now according to Variety, Musk has thanked Apple — and also Disney — for continuing to be Twitter's biggest advertisers. Musk was speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco on March 7, 2023.
As well as alluding to a few other large advertisers and specifically calling out Apple and Disney, Musk also claimed that his "immediate and drastic action" is saving Twitter from its dire finances.
"There have been a few bumps in the road, but this is to be expected," he said. "Now we have the opportunity to grow [Twitter] into something spectacular."
"I don't want to jinx it or anything," he continued, "but I think we have a shot at being cash flow positive in the second quarter."
While Musk's Twitter raging against Apple was presumably quietened by the company continuing to advertise, at the time his turnaround followed Tim Cook giving him a tour of Apple Park.
Prior to that, he'd claimed Apple was threatening to remove Twitter from the App Store "but won't tell us why." And in his turn he threatened to "make an alternative phone," if Apple did remove it.
Following the Apple Park tour, Musk announced that Apple had "never considered" removing Twitter from the App Store.
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11 Comments
Whatevs -- he'll be singing a different tune every day from now until forever.
I've been highly skeptical of Musk's Twitter takeover and remain so. However -- I have to admit that Twitter has held up better than I expected. Mastodon has picked up a lot of new users, but my casual impression is that a relatively small share of Twitter's user base has actively moved to primarily using Mastodon (or any other service; but if somebody has hard data rather than casual impressions, I'd love to see it).
I think for Mastodon et al to really take large number of users away from Twitter, there needs to be more intentional and well-resourced efforts to really make that happen. Given enough time, I think it's more likely than not that such efforts will eventually emerge, given enough time.
So I think this is a bit of a race. How long will it take for competitors to get their act together to really start going after Twitter's user base? How long will it take for Musk to pull his head out of his a$$?
Musk has an extensive track record of misleading public comments about Tesla so I wouldn't think that's going to improve with a company that isn't even publicly traded. In February, it was nothing but reports about Twitter being reduced to offering "fire sale" Super Bowl advertising packages.
The last I heard he was mocking an employee with a disability,
Twitter under the Elon Musk Clown show is just going down piece by piece…….
$44 billion pissed into the wind.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/technology/web-guru-why-twitter-is-falling-apart-under-elon-musk/article_564d67ae-bd17-11ed-aeba-570b41d44291.html
Tesla does no favors by keeping out Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. But you don’t see the CEO’s of the perspective companies bitching about that. Maybe they should?