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hat would you do with $6.5 billion? If you were Jony Ive, you’d buy real estate. After snapping up most of a block in San Francisco’s Jackson Square during the pandemic, the British designer spent nearly $73 million in a single day last month on four homes in Belvedere. The tiny, water‑bordered enclave near Tiburon boasts views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the city skyline. The Chronicle first named Ive as the buyer. His entities acquired three houses at the end of a narrow court on Golden Gate Avenue and a fourth on Beach Road. The largest, a five‑bedroom, 11‑bathroom estate with four fireplaces, sold for $43.5 million. Its annual tax bill of $590,000 is 28 times the median in Belvedere‑Tiburon, where Zillow lists the average single‑family home at $4.3 million. How the four properties will be used remains unclear; a spokesperson declined to comment. Public records show that entities linked to Apercen Partners, a Palo Alto tax firm, previously owned the homes.
A neighbor, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Standard that the three Golden Gate Avenue houses have largely sat empty, though one was once rented to disgraced tech CEO Samuel “Mouli” Cohen for $15,000 a month before his 2012 conviction on wire fraud, money laundering and tax evasion. “It’ll be hard to throw parties on this street without valet parking,” the neighbor added. Other tech moguls, such as Mark Zuckerberg, who owns 11 houses in Palo Alto, use their properties for entertaining or as guest homes, though his compound is heavily surveilled despite some vacant units.
Ive’s new boss, Sam Altman, has been buying houses in Russian Hill. In February, the OpenAI chief added three more properties to his portfolio, on top of a leaky mansion he already owned. The timing of Ive’s Belvedere spree coincided with reports that his team might be designing OpenAI’s first physical product. In May, OpenAI acquired Ive’s AI‑device startup for $6.5 billion, entrusting a 50‑person team to build hardware that leverages ChatGPT. Sources say the firm has agreements with two Chinese suppliers who previously worked on Apple products. The rumored devices include a smart speaker, glasses, a digital voice recorder, and a wearable pin. Before the acquisition was announced, Altman said he’d received a prototype of the device to take home. In a nine‑minute hype video, he described it as “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen,” without revealing details.
