Apple Design Guru Jony Ive To Become A Billionaire Thanks To OpenAI

The man who designed the iPhone is about to join Forbes’ billionaires list. On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that it’s acquiring legendary Apple designer Jony Ive’s artificial intelligence hardware startup io in an all-stock deal that values the company at $6.5 billion and will likely push Ive’s net worth to ten digits in the coming years.

Forbes estimates that Ive owns 11% of io and is set to receive shares of OpenAI worth $715 million, though the stock won’t fully vest for several years, according to a source familiar with the matter. The deal is subject to regulatory approval. Before launching io last year, Ive spent nearly three highly-compensated decades at Apple designing its products. He also has a real estate empire worth an estimated $100 million (net of debt) and a design firm called LoveFrom that does around $200 million of annualized revenue.

Ive—who Steve Jobs once said had “more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me”—may already be a billionaire, though it’s hard to know for sure, since his 27 years of Apple pay packages were never publicly disclosed. His shareholdings did briefly appear in SEC filings covering a four year period from 2008 to 2011, during which time he cashed in stock he received as compensation for an estimated $75 million (after taxes). Ive declined to comment for this story.

Details of what exactly they’re building are sparse, but the io acquisition seems to be a key part of OpenAI’s strategy to build new AI-powered hardware devices, according to a video Ive appeared in with OpenAI cofounder and billionaire CEO Sam Altman on Wednesday, the day the agreement was announced.

“We are sitting at the beginning of what I believe is the greatest technological revolution of our time,” Ive, 58, said in the video. “I have a growing sense that everything I’ve learned over the last 30 years has led me to this moment.”

Ive’s year-old startup, which he cofounded with former Apple colleagues Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan, grew out of a partnership with Ive’s design firm LoveFrom that began in 2023, around the time LoveFrom started quietly working with OpenAI. “It became very quickly apparent to both of us that we needed a third company,” Altman said in the video interview. Initially io operated in stealth, growing to 55 employees of its own (in addition to LoveFrom’s 60) and raising two rounds of funding totaling an estimated $225 million from several firms, including Sutter Hill Ventures, the Emerson Collective, Thrive Capital and OpenAI—which already owned a reported 23% stake in io before Wednesday’s announcement. The $5 billion OpenAI is paying io’s shareholders for the remaining 77% will likely come in the form of OpenAI profit-sharing units, which typically vest over four years, meaning it’ll be a while before Ive’s stock is released to him. “It’s going to unlock over the next few years,” a person familiar with the deal told Forbes. “The  whole way this has been structured is to make sure everyone is aligned on the work.”

In the video announcement, Altman said io’s mission is to “create a family of devices that would let people use AI to create all sorts of wonderful things. The first one we’ve been working on has just completely captured our imagination.” Seemingly, that means the two Silicon Valley legends are working on a consumer-facing, AI-powered hardware product, which is a tough market to crack. Meta and Google have tried, but their glasses have yet to achieve widespread adoption. Same story with startups Humane and Rabbit (whose Humane pin and Rabbit R1 devices Ive recently derided in an interview with Bloomberg as “poor products”).

But Sutter Hill Ventures’ managing director Mike Speiser, who invested in both of io’s funding rounds, thinks that if anyone’s up to the task, it’s the io team. “After working with them, I’d never want to compete with this team building consumer products, ever,” Speiser told Forbes on Wednesday. “The founders are among the greatest builders of consumer products in history.”

Born in London, Ive moved to the U.S. in 1992 to join Apple, “drawn by the exhilarating optimism of San Francisco and Silicon Valley,” he said in the video with Altman Wednesday.

Ive would stay at Apple for the next three decades in various design executive roles, eventually becoming its chief design officer from 2015 to 2019. During this time, Ive helped design the iMac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, MacBook and the user interface of Apple’s operating system. The proceeds from his work at Apple were more than enough for Ive to pay $17 million in 2012 for a Willis-Polk-designed house in San Francisco with views of the Golden Gate Bridge, which he still owns.

Ive left Apple in 2019 and started his own firm, LoveFrom (the name is reportedly from a conversation with Steve Jobs; Ive was a close friend of Jobs, who died in 2011). Yet he remained close to the tech giant, doing design work for Apple through 2022 under a multi-year, $100 million contract, according to the New York Times. Ives and LoveFrom also designed for high-profile clients Airbnb and Ferrari, and created a series of $2,000+ jackets for billionaire Remo Ruffini’s clothing firm, Moncler.

Around this time, Ive also started scooping up real estate—both personally and through LoveFrom-affiliated entities—in the San Francisco area. Between 2020 and 2024, he spent nearly $150 million on commercial real estate, including a splashy $60 million purchase of the 35,000-square-foot Little Fox Theatre last year. Most of Ive’s real estate sits on the same block in the Jackson Square neighborhood, and he’s spending tens of millions to develop and renovate the properties, per a source familiar with the operation.

After the merger goes through, Ive’s design studio LoveFrom will continue operating as a separate entity, but work on a contract basis for OpenAI’s io team—OpenAI will effectively become LoveFrom’s main client, and LoveFrom doesn’t plan to take on any new clients, according to a source with knowledge of the companies. The person characterized the partnership as having a “design side” (LoveFrom) and “engineering side” (io/OpenAI). Ive, meanwhile, doesn’t plan to join OpenAI, instead opting to run the creative and design side of the project from within LoveFrom—and doing so with seemingly unbridled optimism. “I’m absolutely certain that we are literally on the brink of a new generation of technology that can make us our better selves,” Ive said in the video interview.