Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has a message for Apple’s new boss John Ternus.
Tim Cook spent his last day as CEO on August 31 sending a farewell memo to staff and stays on as executive chairman, handling policymakers and government relationships. Epic sued Apple and Google in August 2020 after adding a direct payment option to Fortnite, which got the game pulled from both app stores. Sweeney has said the legal bills in the Apple case alone crossed $100 million, and that Fortnite had earned roughly $300 million on iOS in its two years there.
Counting lost players and the network effect of friends who could not join, he has put the total damage to Epic at a billion dollars or more. The timing was deliberate. Sweeney used the handover to make a direct pitch to the incoming CEO, an engineer who ran Apple’s hardware group and shipped the iPhone Air, the MacBook Neo and the hearing-aid AirPods before moving into the top job. His longer post reads less like a legal position and more like an appeal to what Apple used to be. Here it is in full: “I hope Apple looks toward the future as optimistically as I do, seeing a blue ocean of opportunity to radically advance the hardware, the intelligence of the software, and the quality and spirit of the whole app ecosystem for everyone’s benefit. A company that looks to grow its business by bringing computing more meaningfully to everyone’s lives and by creating more value from its own efforts, rather than extracting ever more from a world on fire. I grew up in the era of the Apple of Woz, profoundly influenced by a computer empowering anyone to boot up, write programs, and share them with others. I believe that’s the ideal all developers should hold out for, and that the necessities of privacy and security are absolutely compatible with robust competition among stores, payments, and the other things.
John Ternus formally took charge as Apple ‘s chief executive on September 1, and one of the first public messages addressed to the new boss came from the man who has spent six years suing his company. Tim Sweeney, the Epic Games founder behind Fortnite, posted in the early hours of Tuesday that Apple was entering a new age, and that the eras in the company’s history have been read very differently by users, developers and shareholders.