I mean Apple's account seems a lot more believable to me. I know we all want Jason Bourne to be real, but he isn't.

Why trust Apple over Bloomberg? What if the hack were so bad (e.g. a keylogger + who knows what else) that none of the tech giants would ever admit it?

It's not about trust (at least for me). It's about the credibility of the account. "Journalists got something wrong" is a lot easier for me to believe than "there is a massive conspiracy to cover something up and there just so happens to be no evidence of it besides our say so."

Hmm. The involvement of Elemental is enough evidence for me. A then 200-person startup with maybe 10 hardware engineers and lots of government clients would be a great target. It makes me thing the hack was real. Why else would Bloomberg have even bothered to report about Elemental?

So, are you saying that if a big journalism outlet wants to convince you that a world-shaking hack has occurred, all they have to do is name a plausible target? Interesting. My standards of evidence are higher.

It's not necessarily all or nothing.

It could be that the actual story is something at some small company, which ballooned into a shit storm of assumptions and embellishment.

I'm not saying I believe either party in this mess, but to be fair Occam's Razor is used very often to disregard legitimately viable conspiracy theories.

Then Apple would simply say nothing.

Saying nothing is Apple's thing. No one would question them saying nothing.