Jony Ive: Also thanks to the Jobs widow to the billionaire

The purchase of Jony Ives Ki hardware company “IO” by Openaai makes the former Apple design chief at least on paper as a billionaire. On the deal, which makes IVE the Openai major shareholder, not only benefits the father of iPod, iPhone, iMac & Co., also the Steve-Jobs widow Laurene Powell jobs. That reports The Financial Times. Because: Powell Jobs has invested in IO directly and in Ives design company LoveFrome. “Without Laurene, there would be no lovefrome,” Ive told the financial newspaper that appears in London.

Designers get a lot of paper money

IVE had left Apple in 2019 – apparently partially in the dispute. After that, he founded his “creative collective” in San Francisco, apparently supported by Powell Jobs, where he now has large parts of the Jackson Square district next to the financial district. With the heir from Jobs, who was also the largest single shareholder of Disney, Powell Jobs, which was also the largest single shareholder of Disney, operates a company called Emerson Collective. Among other things, this belongs to the liberal magazine The Atlantic. According to Financial Times, she put an unnamed sum in LoveFrome and then in the said AI company IO, which now incorporated Openai into share for $ 6.4 billion-whereby the IO investors, including IVE, should get around 5 billion because Openai was one of the co-founders of Io.

What the company’s product should be is unclear, it should probably be a AI device without a screen. According to Openai boss Sam Altman, a “family of AI devices” is planned. According to Financial Times, IVE should now be a “billionaire” at least on paper if he was not already in the meantime during his work at Apple. Other partners from IVE also got a “surprising money blessing”, according to the Financial Times, including Ives design partners Marc Newson and Powell jobs. Here, too, no cash flows, there are openai shares. The AI ​​group is not listed on the stock exchange (whether this has ever been done is unclear), but there are so-called secondary markets for shareholders from young companies. Since Openai is in great demand here, the shares are also very likely to be lined.

There is still only an announcement video

No one yet knows what kind of device that IVE seems to be planning together with Altman for a good two years. The market should only come onto the coming year. Behind it are large parts of Apple’s old design team that Ive had overturned. However, the project lacks a “editor -in -chief” as it Steve Jobs once at Apple for Jony Ive was.

The role now seems to want to take on Altman, although he has not yet launched a hardware product in his life. Compared to the Financial Times, IVE did not want to provide any information on what kind of Openai hardware this should be. It is about ending our “bad relationship with technology”, which means, among other things, social media and the smartphone (which he clearly preliminary thanks to iPhone). “Humanity deserves something better,” says Ive.