Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook Inc., has been grumbling for years that Apple Inc. and its leader, Tim Cook, exert too much influence on the social media giant’s business. In 2018 his anger boiled over.
Facebook was embroiled in controversy over its data collection practices. Mr. Cook stepped up in a nationally televised interview, saying his own company would never have ended up in such a jam. Mr. Zuckerberg retorted that Mr. Cook’s comments were “extremely slippery” and “not at all in tune with the truth.”
In private, Mr. Zuckerberg was even harder. “We have to inflict pain,” he told his team for treating the company so badly, said people familiar with the exchange.
It was not the first time – or the last – that Mr. Cook’s comments and actions seized Mr. Zuckerberg and sometimes planned to take back Apple. The escalation of grievances erupted late last month in a rare public tit-for-tat between the two tech giants who exposed the simmering animosity between their leaders, who exchanged privacy, app tracking tools and, ultimately, their dueling visions of the future of internet.
Apple has positioned itself as the protector of digital privacy by upholding a greater commodity, while often criticizing Facebook’s business model – without mentioning the company. All of that fits with Facebook, which sees Apple over-reaching in a way that threatens the existence of Facebook, and hypocritically, also by doing a lot of business in China, where privacy is scarce. An attempt in 2017 to address the tensions through a face-to-face meeting between the two CEOs resulted in a tense deadlock.