apple inc chairman Tim cook had an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion as of January of this year. That made him 2,083. richest people in the world, well behind the fortunes of Mark Zuckerberg ($142 billion) and the richest man in the world, Elon Muskwith $189 billion to his name.

But despite his comparatively modest net worth, Apple’s CEO is capable of wiping out large chunks of Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s empires — and the two moguls know it.

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You may have seen Musk’s tweet over the weekend claiming Apple was considering removing Twitter from its App Store without providing any evidence — a move that would essentially cut Twitter off from the App Store’s billions of users.

Musk also condemned Apple’s practice of cutting App Store sales by 30% and accused the company of cracking down on free speech.

And on Tuesday Metaplatforms Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in with his own complaints. In an interview with The New York Times, Zuckerberg said it’s problematic for a single company to control which app experiences land on a device and lamented that “the vast majority of profits in the mobile ecosystem go to Apple.” .

Luckily for Musk, a private meeting with Cook shortly after seems to have cleared up any confusion, with Musk tweeting his assurances that Apple has no plans to remove Twitter from its App Store.

But the App Store isn’t Apple’s only weapon against other tech titans. Changes to terms of service or privacy policies can have devastating effects on other companies’ business models — as seen in January, when a change to Apple’s iOS privacy policy resulted in a $10 billion loss in Meta’s annual revenue, according to Facebook parent Meta.

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can meta, Tesla Inc and a host of other tech companies to break free of Apple’s stranglehold? Musk will already…