Elon Musk says he plans to sue Apple for not featuring X or Grok among top apps
Billionaire SpaceX, Tesla and X owner Elon Musk says he plans to sue Apple for not featuring X and its Grok artificial intelligence chatbot app in the top recommended apps in its App Store.
Mr Musk posted the comments on X late on Monday, saying: “Hey @Apple App Store, 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? Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know.”
Grok is owned by Mr Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI.
‘Antitrust violation’
Mr Musk went on to say that “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. xAI will take immediate legal action”.
He gave no further details.
There was no immediate comment from Apple, which has faced various allegations of antitrust violations in recent years.
A judge recently found that Apple violated a court injunction in an antitrust case filed by Fortnite maker Epic Games.
European Union
Regulators of the European Union fined Apple 500 million euros (£431.8 million) in April for breaking competition rules by preventing app makers from pointing users to cheaper options outside its App Store.
Last year, the EU fined the US tech giant nearly two billion dollars (£1.4 billion) for unfairly favouring its own music streaming service by forbidding rivals like Spotify from telling users how they could pay for cheaper subscriptions outside of iPhone apps.
As of early Tuesday, the top app in Apple’s App Store was TikTok, followed by Tinder, Duolingo, YouTube and Bumble.
Open AI’s ChatGPT was ranked 7th.
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Do not conflate the very legitimate legal issues brought by the EU with whatever nonsense Musk is spewing. Under his tenure, Twitter/X is no longer even a shadow of its former self. It is a haven of white supremacy, racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, and any other form of discrimination or hatred you could think of. Only recently his “Grok” “AI” service was describing rape in highly graphic sexual detail and calling itself “Mecha Hitler”, and this was as a direct result of attempts to make it “less woke” and “tell it like it is”. You own the largest mobile app distribution… Read more »