Tech billionaire Elon Musk is once again stirring the pot—this time with Apple. He’s threatened to sue the company, accusing it of stacking the deck in its App Store to favor rivals while undercutting his own products.
It’s Musk’s boldest fight since June, when he and President Donald Trump hurled insults back and forth on their social media platforms.
On Monday night, in a flurry of posts on his social media platform, X, the former head of the Department of Government Efficiency alleged that Apple had rigged its mobile rankings to keep OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the top while his AI chatbot, Grok, languished in sixth place in the U.S.
"Elon sucks” by Clay Jones
Musk also claimed Apple was “playing politics” by leaving both X and Grok off its “Must Have” recommendations and warned that his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, “will take immediate legal action.”
“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation,” Musk wrote.
In a pinned post, Musk directly addressed Apple.
“Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your ‘Must Have’ section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?” he said.
This outrage is rich coming from Musk. He has been accused of manipulating algorithms on X himself, with a 2024 study finding that the platform’s feed was tweaked to boost his posts. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman happily reminded followers of a 2023 Platformer report, which claimed Musk had a special system in place to amplify his tweets across the site.
Even Grok has faced controversy. In June, the so-called “maximally truth-seeking” bot was caught incorporating Musk’s personal views into answers about abortion, immigration, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. More recently, it’s received bipartisan criticism for spreading antisemitic content, including Holocaust denial, praise for Adolf Hitler, and the repeated use of the meme “every damn time.”
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The conflict with Apple adds to a years-long feud. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, left in 2018, and has since accused Altman and Microsoft of abandoning the company’s mission to benefit “humanity broadly.” He is already suing them.
Ironically, before threatening Apple, Musk had been celebrating Grok’s rise past Google to become the fifth most popular free app in Apple’s store. But that elusive “Must Have” feature still apparently frustrates him.
Apple, for its part, faces its own legal issues: The Justice Department sued it last year for allegedly monopolizing the smartphone market, and the European Union has imposed billions of dollars in fines, including nearly $2 billion for favoring Apple Music over Spotify.
Whether Musk will actually follow through on his legal threats remains uncertain. Apple’s close ties with Trump—with a $100 billion investment pledge and CEO Tim Cook’s lavish gift to the president—could make the company an important ally in Washington, D.C. Trump has called Cook “one of the great and most esteemed business leaders and geniuses and innovators anywhere in the world.”
Apple’s alliance with OpenAI only adds fuel to the fire. Last year, it announced plans to integrate ChatGPT into its devices—prompting Musk to vow a ban on Apple products at Tesla, SpaceX, and X. Like many of his threats, that one has yet to come true.
