Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts that he believes Facebook is the "one company that is closest to being like Apple" and that he had huge respect for the company, according to a new profile in Fortune.

Cook's comments about Facebook came in February, after Apple CFO Pete Oppenheimer gave a 45-minute presentation at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Cook came into the room about 20 minutes into Oppenheimer's talk and then offered his thoughts on Facebook, with which he said Apple would like to work more closely. Cook didn't expand on his comments about how Facebook is like Apple.

The olive branch was delivered after the two companies nearly fell out over the development of the Facebook iPad app. According to sources, Jobs was "livid" when he discovered that Facebook, which had promised to give Apple first dibs on a tablet app, had developed one for Hewlett-Packard's WebOS.

Despite Jobs's anger over that incident, however, he expressed admiration for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In Walter Isaacson's bio Steve Jobs, Jobs says of the Facebook founder: “We talk about social networks in the plural,” Jobs told Isaacson, “but I don’t see anybody other than Facebook out there, just Facebook. They are dominating this. I admire Mark Zuckerberg... for not selling out, for wanting to make a company. I admire that a lot.”