Mark Zuckerberg told staff to dump iPhones after tiff with Apple CEO.

Report says CEO retaliated against Apple after dis

So much for the old “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me” adage. Because even when you’re a billionaire and running one of the most popular companies on Earth, you can have your feelings hurt.

That’s what seems to have happened to Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg after he heard what he considered to be dispar- aging remarks from Apple CEO Tim Cook. And as a result, Zuckerberg threw out all of the Apple iPhones that were used by his management team.

OK, maybe Zuckerberg didn’t literally dump a bunch of executives’ iPhones in the trash. But, in one of the more darkly humorous examples of behavior noted in Wednesday’s New York Times exposé of how Facebook responded to Russian use of the social network during the 2016 presidential election, Zuckerberg didn’t like some things Cook said about how Facebook handles the private data and information for its users, and he retaliated in one of the easiest ways he knew how:

He told his people to stop using iPhones.

According to the Times, Zuckerberg told his staff to get rid of their iPhones and switch over to mobile phones running on Google’s Android operating system. The Times said Zuckerberg made the decision because the Android “operating system had far more users than Apple’s.”

What did Cook say to get on Zuckerberg’s bad side? The Times pointed to an interview that Cook gave to MSNBC in which he said, “We’re not going to traffic in your personal life,” and “Privacy to us is a human right. It’s a civil liberty.” That was just one of the many other times Cook has tried to paint Apple as a champion of privacy while taking a dig at Facebook and others.

On Thursday, Facebook doubled down on the matter. In a company blog post, Facebook called out Cook by name, saying he “has consistently criticized our business model and Mark has been equally clear he disagrees. So there’s been no need to employ anyone else to do this for us. And we’ve long encouraged our employees and executives to use Android because it is the most popular operating system in the world.”