If Mark Zuckerberg’s new laid-back look (complete with shaggy hair and thick gold chains) is any indication, he’s very different from the uptight, crew-cut Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook. It’s no wonder that the business philosophies of Zuckerberg’s META and Apple are as different as the leaders of the two companies. Zuckerberg was keen to point out those differences and spice up a decades-old feud between the two tech giants and their respective CEOs.
While Meta prioritizes rapid response and user engagement, including by open-sourcing its Llama AI model, Apple prefers to maintain a closed ecosystem of sophisticated, proprietary products, Zuckerberg said in an episode of the Acquired podcast published on Tuesday.
“I think in a lot of ways we’re the opposite of Apple,” he said. “Obviously, their products are doing really well too. They take a ‘take a long time, hone it, ship it,’ approach. And what they’re doing is probably working because it fits their culture.”
Ever since Tim Cook took the helm of the tech giant, Apple has prided itself on being the best, not the first. That policy has largely worked for the company, as evidenced by its status as the world’s largest smartphone provider. Apple has long been a fan of the walled gardens of its own products, leading to a uniform lineup of apps and accessories to accompany its tech and drawing a major antitrust lawsuit from the Department of Justice.
But Zuckerberg praised Meta’s unique “spaghetti-at-the-wall” approach to its product, which he believes has elicited useful criticism and allowed the company to grow despite its failures.
“You really have to have a culture that’s more about shipping and putting things out there and getting feedback, rather than always getting amazing positive praise from people when you put something out,” he said.
Indeed, the feedback on Meta has been endless: social media platform Thread, for example, grew to 100 million users only to see a sharp decline in accounts a few weeks later; the company’s flagship product, Metaverse, was a $46.5 billion flop, but Zuckerberg still added $58 billion to his net worth this year.
Zuckerberg said Apple’s perfectionism had cost the company, arguing that the company prioritizes praise over constructive feedback from users.
“If you always wait for praise, you miss out on a lot of time where you could have learned a lot of useful things and incorporated them into the next version you release,” he said.
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Apple and Meta did not immediately respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.
Billionaires Clash
Zuckerberg’s comments about Apple’s business practices aren’t the first time he’s offered up thoughts about Cook’s company. For more than a decade, Zuckerberg and Cook have had differing philosophies not just about how Apple rolls out its products, but also about the future of the internet more broadly.
The Meta-Apple battle came to a head earlier this month when Meta called for increased government regulation of social media platforms, proposing that Apple and Google impose age restrictions and parental consent requirements, but Apple opposed, arguing that it was the platforms’ responsibility to impose restrictions.
Tensions between the two companies have been rising since Cook suggested in 2014 that Facebook profited from collecting personal information. The following year, Apple rolled out the motto “Privacy is a fundamental human right.” Cook also slammed Facebook as a hotbed of Russian disinformation aimed at misleading American voters ahead of the 2016 election.
Zuckerberg seemed keen to ignite the tech race today, calling Apple Meta his “main competitor” on Tuesday’s podcast — something Cook has previously disagreed with.
“Yes, I think we compete in some ways,” Cook said in 2021. “But if you ask me who our biggest competitors are, they wouldn’t be on the list. We’re not in the social networking business.”
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com.
