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Billionaire SpaceX, Tesla and X owner Elon Musk says he plans to sue Apple for not featuring X and its Grok artificial intelligence chatbot app in its top recommended apps in its App Store. Musk posted the comments on X late Monday, saying, Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your Must Have section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps? Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know. Grok is owned by Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI. Musk went on to say that Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action. He gave no further details. There was no immediate comment from Apple, which has faced various allegations of antitrust violations in recent years. A federal judge recently found that Apple violated a court injunction in an antitrust case filed by Fortnite maker Epic Games. Regulators of the 27-nation European Union fined Apple 500 million euros in April for breaking competition rules by preventing app makers from pointing users to cheaper options outside its App Store. Last year, the EU fined the U.S. tech giant nearly $2 billion for unfairly favoring its own music streaming service by forbidding rivals like Spotify from telling users how they could pay for cheaper subscriptions outside of iPhone apps. As of early Tuesday, the top app in Apple’s App Store was TikTok, followed by Tinder, Duolingo, YouTube and Bumble. Open AI’s ChatGPT was ranked 7th.
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E-Commerce
Metas Threads is on a roll. The social networking app is now home to more than 400 million monthly active users, Meta shared with Fast Company on Tuesday. Thats 50 million more than just a few months ago, and a long way from the 175 million it had around its first birthday last summer. Launched in July 2023 with a record-breaking 100 million signups in its first days, Threads quickly positioned itself as Metas best shot at challenging Elon Musks X. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, made no secret of his ambitions back then, setting a goal of one billion users. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasnt nailed it,” he wrote at the time. “Hopefully we will. Todays numbers suggest that bet is paying off, although that one billion goal is still a bit far away. Neck and neck on mobile A big part of the story now is just how close Threads is getting to X when it comes to daily use on phones. Data from Similarweb shows that Threads had 115.1 million daily active mobile users in Junethats up a whopping 128% from last year. X still has the edge at 132 million, but its sliding, with daily actives down more than 15% year over year. In the U.S., the gaps even smaller: 15.3 million daily mobile users for Threads versus 22.9 million for X, according to Similarweb. X does not regularly share user data and did not respond to a request for more details about its current user base. On the web? Thats where Threads is still lagging. X is pulled in 145.8 million daily visits in June compared to just 6.9 million for Threads. Bluesky, the smaller rival in this race, is even closer to Threads in web traffic than you might expectthough its daily mobile audience is tiny by comparison. Finding its own vibe Threads isnt trying to be a carbon copy of X. Meta says 63% of posts are text-only, and people who use Threads every day follow less than half the same accounts they do on Instagram. That means new communities are springing upfrom Bookthreads for literature fans to basketball and music hubswith a friendlier, less combative tone than you might find on some other platforms. The apps also been adding features fast: trending topics, live sports scores, a developer API for automated posts, and deeper connections to the fediverse so people can interact with Mastodon users and other decentralized networks. Why now? Threads momentum comes at a time when X is dealing with advertiser skepticism and growing competition from smaller players like Bluesky. Social media as a whole is also more fragmented than ever, with different groups heading to Discord, LinkedIn, Reddit, or just group chats. While four hundred million users is still a long way from Zuckerbergs billion-user dream, with mobile usage nearly matching Xs, Threads isnt just chasing anymore. Its catching up.
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E-Commerce
U.S. inflation was unchanged in July as rising prices for some imported goods were balanced by falling gas and grocery prices, leaving overall prices modestly higher than a year ago. Consumer prices rose 2.7% in July from a year earlier, the Labor Department said Tuesday, the same as the previous month and up from a post-pandemic low of 2.3% in April. Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core prices rose 3.1%, up from 2.9% in June. Both figures are above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. The new numbers suggest that slowing rent increases and cheaper gas are offsetting some impacts of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs. Many businesses are also likely still absorbing much of the cost of the duties. Tuesday’s figures probably reflect some impact from the 10% universal tariff Trump imposed in April, as well as higher duties on countries such as China and Canada. Brian Bethune, an economist at Boston College, said that overall U.S. tariffs calculated as the amount of duties paid by U.S. companies divided by overall imports has reached 10%, the highest in decades, and will likely keep rising for months. Those cost increases will be passed on to the consumer in some way, shape, or form, Bethune said. Some companies could return to shrinkflation, he added, in which they reduce the package size of a good while keeping the price the same. And companies that are absorbing tariff costs, which would cut into their profit margins, are less likely to hire new employees, he said. The Federal Reserve may now be in a difficult spot. Hiring slowed sharply in the spring, after Trump announced tariffs in April. The stalling out of job gains has boosted financial market expectations for an interest rate cut by the central bank at its next meeting in September, and some Fed officials have raised concerns about the health of the job market. A rate cut by the Fed often, but not always, lowers borrowing costs for mortgages, car loans, and business loans. Economists are divided over how Fed officials will read the data in the coming months. Some argued that the worsening jobs picture will outweigh lingering inflation concerns and lead the Fed to cut at its next meeting in September. Yet some say that with core inflation notably above 2% and rising, the Fed will postpone that decision. Chair Jerome Powell has warned that worsening inflation could keep the Fed on the sidelines a stance that has enraged Trump, who has defied traditional norms of central bank independence and demanded lower borrowing costs. On Tuesday, Trump attacked Powell again for not cutting rates and suggested he would allow a lawsuit against the Fed to proceed because of the rising costs of its extensive building renovation. It wasn’t clear what lawsuit he was referring to. On a monthly basis, prices rose 0.2% in July, down from 0.3% the previous month, while core prices ticked up 0.3%, a bit faster than the 0.2% in June. Gas prices fell 2.2% from June to July and have plunged 9.5% from a year earlier, the government’s report said. Grocery prices slipped 0.1% last month, though they are still 2.2% higher than a year ago. Tariffs appeared to raise the cost of some imported items: Shoe prices jumped 1.4% from June to July, though they are still just 0.9% more expensive than a year ago. The cost of furniture leapt 0.9% in July and is 3.2% higher than a year earlier. Coffee costs nearly 15% more than a year earlier, mostly because of troubled harvests overseas, though steep duties on imports from Brazil could push those prices higher in the coming months. Nearly all U.S. coffee is imported. Tuesday’s data arrives at a highly-charged moment for the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, which collects and publishes the inflation data. Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, then the head of BLS, after the Aug. 1 jobs report also showed sharply lower hiring for May and June than had previously been reported. The president posted on social media Monday that he has picked E.J. Antoni, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a frequent critic of the jobs report, to replace McEntarfer. Adding to the turmoil at BLS is a government hiring freeze that has forced it to cut back on the data it collects for each inflation report, the agency has said. UBS economist Alan Detmeister estimates that BLS is now collecting about 18% fewer price quotes for the inflation report than it did earlier this year. He thinks the report will produce more volatile results, though averaged out over time, still reliable. Smaller companies are trying to avoid raising prices and some have turned to novel ways of raising funds. Clothing maker Princess Awesome, which designs matching clothes for children and adults, has seen its costs jump 15% to 20% because of the tariffs. The company has joined a lawsuit seeking to block the duties. Rebecca Melsky, CEO and co-founder of the firm, says it is prohibitively expensive to make the cotton blend fabrics it uses in the United States. For now, the company has instituted a tip jar on its website where it asks customers to help defray the cost of goods. We have not across the board raised prices because of the tariffs — yet, she said. Trump has insisted that overseas manufacturers will pay the tariffs by reducing their prices to offset the duties. Yet the pre-tariff prices of imports haven’t fallen much since the levies were put in place. Economists at Goldman Sachs estimate that foreign manufacturers have absorbed just 14% of the duties through June, while 22% has been paid by consumers and 64% by U.S. companies. Yet the economists expect that by this fall consumers will bear two-thirds of the burden, while foreign exporters pay a quarter and U.S. companies handle less than a tenth. Many large corporations are raising prices, including apparel makers Ralph Lauren and Under Armour, and eyewear company Warby Parker. Most of those increases weren’t in place for Tuesday’s inflation report. Consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, maker of Crest toothpaste, Tide detergent and Charmin toilet paper, said late last month that it would lift prices in August on about a quarter of its products by mid-single-digit percentages. Walmart has also raised prices. And cosmetics maker e.l.f. Beauty, which makes amajority of its products in China, said on Wednesday that it had raised prices by a dollar on its entire product assortment as of Aug. 1 because of tariff costs, the third price hike in its 21-year history. Christopher Rugaber, AP economics writer Associated Press Retail Writer Anne D’Innocenzio contributed to this report.
Category:
E-Commerce
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