Vows: Jony Ive and Sam Altman

Years of mutual infatuation lead a designer and a CEO to make it official in front of reporters and investors alike

By Matt Haber

2:15 PM PDT on May 21, 2025

Sam Altman and Jony Ive publicly announced their partnership Wednesday. Photo: OpenAI

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On May 21st, Sir Jony Ive and Sam Altman were married in San Francisco. The pair began seeing one another “tentatively” two years ago, they said in a joint statement. As time went on, they found themselves growing closer in the spirit of “friendship, curiosity and shared values.”

Mr. Altman, 40, who has overseen OpenAI since 2015 (with some obstacles along the way), gave Mr. Ive, 58, $6.5 billion for IO, a company founded one year ago.

“I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this moment,” said Mr. Ive, whose previous long-term relationship with Apple ended in 2022 after he oversaw the design of everything from the iMac to the iPhone to the company's $5 billion headquarters in Cupertino.

In recent years, Mr. Ive has been spotted around the Jackson Square neighborhood cavorting with Airbnb, Ferrari, and other companies. It’s unclear if Mr. Ive will leave Jackson Square, where he has significant real estate holdings, and move in with Mr. Altman, whose company occupies 4.7 million square feet in various parts of San Francisco.

The announcement of Messrs. Ive and Altman’s relationship has been warmly received by the press, a welcome change from years of bad publicity for Mr. Altman whose reputation as something of a bad boy precedes him.

While many new partners in the first flush of a relationship such as this are loath to mention their significant other’s exes, Mr. Altman — never one to constrain himself when it comes to placing one word after another and forming syntactically precise but hollow sentences in patterns that nearly mimic human thought — said, “I hope we can bring some of the delight, wonder and creative spirit that I first felt using an Apple Computer 30 years ago.”