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“We Need to Have This Knife Fight:” Apple and Facebook Hit the Mattresses

Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook
Image collage via Getty.
Alex Kantrowitz
October 21, 2021

“While no one wants to see two trillion-dollar companies having a knife fight,” read the internal strategy document drafted by Facebook executives, “we need to have this knife fight.” This elegant depiction of boardroom barbarism is hardly surprising. Facebook has a famously pugilistic culture, stemming from the early “move fast and break things” era to Mark Zuckerberg’s Carthaginian war-fantasies with Google to Nick Clegg’s aggressive handling of its latest scandal. And the subject of Facebook’s ire is hardly a surprise either: Apple. 

After all, the two Silicon Valley giants have been at each other’s throats for years, competing on messaging, privacy, and clout. Most recently, however, Apple has been working  methodically to cut off Facebook’s ability to track people outside of its app on iOS devices—a move that has left its advertisers “running blind.”