Oliver Haslam on August 3, 2023, 4:41 pm

Elon Musk Wants Tim Cook To Change How The App Store’s 30% Fee Works

Apple’s 30% App Store payment cut is coming under renewed fire, this time from Twitter owner Elon Musk. And he wants things to change.

Musk was writing on Twitter when he discussed the social network’s creator subscription system, noting that Apple takes a 30% cut from the money paid by subscribers. Twitter then takes another cut for itself, but Musk now says that he wants to be able to have Apple’s 30% cut come out of its own portion of the subscription money.

The result would be creators getting more money, and Musk ways he’s going to take the proposition right to the top. He’s going to talk to Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Apple does take 30%, but I will speak with @tim_cook and see if that can be adjusted to be just 30% of what 𝕏 keeps in order to maximize what creators receive.

Whether Cook will be respective to the idea or not, who knows? But it’s a precedent that he seems unlikely to want to set and this might be one of those occasions where Musk will simply have to accept Apple’s 30% cut is here to stay.

If Musk really does want to make sure creators can get more money another solution would be to hand over the difference from Twitter’s cut.

The end result would surely be the same — creators would be getting the money back and whether it comes from Apple or Twitter, they’re unlikely to care.