Elon Musk wants Apple to slash its 30% App Store cut just for him

Elon Musk is going to call on Tim Cook to try and get him to tweak App Store policy to help him and his X, formerly Twitter, social network.

That’s according to a post by the X owner when discussing the company’s new subscription feature that allows creators to earn money from their posts.

Apple currently takes 30% off every subscription that is processed via the App Store payment system, but Musk says that he’ll be reaching out to Apple to try and change that.

30% of X’s cut

Musk’s post actually discusses something that is slightly different to the normal approach that companies take towards Apple’s 30% cut. That approach usually suggests that Apple should take less of a cut from the transactions. But Musk wants to take a different tact.

« 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, » he said. The result would be that creators get to take home more money, with X being the one losing 30% from its cut.

Super Important to Support Creators!If you can afford it, please subscribe to as many creators on this platform as you find interesting. People from every corner of the world post incredible content on 𝕏, but often live in tough circumstances, where even a few hundred…August 2, 2023

Whether Apple will agree to that approach remains to be seen, but it seems unlikely. Apple would still take less from those transactions by carving out the creator’s cut, something it seems unlikely to want to do.

This might also be a precedent that Apple would rather not set because there are no doubt plenty of other situations throughout the App Store where a similar approach could be taken. However, it seems Apple may have recently made a small allowance to let X change its App Store name to its new single-character designation, a format not currently permitted by the company.

What will happen next remains to be seen of course, but we do know we’d love to be a fly on the wall when that discussion with Tim Cook takes place.

Cook of course has plenty of other things on his mind right now. There’s the impending launch of the 2023 Apple Watches of course, not to mention the best iPhones the company has ever made. The iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro lineups are expected to debut next month.