Bezos, Schmidt, Powell Jobs: Three AI Investment Philosophies of Silicon Valley’s Old Money

Original Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

On November 17, 2025, 61-year-old Jeff Bezos became the CEO of a company once again. It was his first time back in a hands-on leadership role since stepping down from Amazon in 2021. The new company is called Project Prometheus, with a starting capital of $6.2 billion, focusing on "Physical AI" and targeting the manufacturing sector.

Seven months prior, 70-year-old Eric Schmidt took control of a rocket company named Relativity Space, installing himself as CEO. He didn't explain why, at his age, he felt the need to get back in the game. Perhaps "every day matters in the AI era" is already the default answer.

In June of the same year, Steve Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, gave a rare public interview. Sitting next to Jony Ive, she discussed a prototype she saw at a company called io. It was an "AI device" that OpenAI acquired for $6.4 billion in stock. The device had no screen and was reportedly shaped like a player hanging around the neck. Her assessment of the prototype: "Seeing an idea become reality is an incredible thing."

Three people, three different approaches. But they are all betting in the same casino.

Over the past three years, Silicon Valley's top money bags have been doing basically the same thing: channeling funds from family offices, venture capital, and charitable foundations, all into AI. Schmidt, Bezos, and Powell Jobs are just the most prominent three. But if you closely examine their target lists, you'll find this isn't the same game. They are investing in three completely different futures.

Schmidt: Treating AI as the Next Cold War

According to data cited by Wikipedia and The AI Insider, Schmidt's family office, Hillspire, has invested in over 22 AI companies since 2019, totaling more than $5 billion. The list includes Anthropic, SandboxAQ (a quantum+AI company spun out of Alphabet), Inworld AI, Holistic AI, and Altera. These are the targets that "industry insiders" would list.

But what truly reveals his nature is another list.

White Stork: a company producing AI drones in Ukraine. Rebellion Defense: defense AI. Istari: simulation and modeling. Swift Beat: military software. This is a family office treating AI as the next generation of military equipment.

Schmidt has been chairing the Defense Innovation Board since 2016 and co-chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence from 2019 to 2021. He's a player who treats AI policy, defense procurement, and energy infrastructure as one single domain. In January 2024, Forbes disclosed that he simultaneously launched the White Stork drone project in the US and Ukraine, using the Ukrainian battlefield as a "laboratory for AI weapons."

Then there's infrastructure.

In January 2026, he co-founded a company called Bolt Data & Energy with Texas Pacific Land, serving as its chairman. This company doesn't lease server rooms or buy grid electricity. It plans to build its own natural gas power plants in the wilderness of West Texas, channeling the electricity directly into data centers. The initial plan is 1 gigawatt, eventually scaling to 10 gigawatts — equivalent to the power consumption of 7 million households. Texas Pacific Land contributes $50 million, along with prioritized water rights. Schmidt said in an email reply to Fortune: "The biggest bottleneck for AI isn't algorithms, it's energy."

In March of the same year, he took control of Relativity Space. The company is developing a reusable rocket called Terran R, aiming to challenge SpaceX's monopoly on low-to-medium orbit launches. At the time, its order book stood at $2.9 billion.

Putting these pieces together, the logic is very clear.

Schmidt doesn't believe in a "basket of foundation model companies" strategy. He believes the outcome of AI will ultimately depend on three things: computing power (data centers and electricity), delivery systems (rockets, satellites, drones), and policy (defense committees and congressional hearings). He invests in model companies too — after DeepSeek emerged, he publicly wrote articles urging the US to increase open-source investment — but that's just one piece on his chessboard, not the whole picture.

His reaction to DeepSeek is very telling. When DeepSeek launched in early 2025, Schmidt immediately wrote an article in the Washington Post, calling it a "turning point in the global AI race." His prescription wasn't retreat, but doubling down: more open-source, more Stargate-style infrastructure, and more sharing of training methods between model labs.

In other words, he sees AI as an endurance race between nations, and he's already standing on the sidelines, simultaneously serving on the organizing committee. For outsiders, a 70-year-old becoming the CEO of Relativity seems like a hassle. But he explains it himself: Kissinger worked until he was 100. "Times of major change demand responsibility, not stepping away."

Bezos: The Full-Stack Control Freak

Bezos' approach is completely different from Schmidts's.

According to data from TechCrunch, The Information, and the Bezos Earth Fund, cited by StartupHub, as of mid-2026, Bezos has deployed over $19 billion into AI. And this number is still growing.

Breaking it down, it mainly falls into three parts.

The first part is Anthropic. Amazon has invested $8 billion in installments since September 2023, and in April 2026, committed an additional potential $25 billion. Anthropic runs on AWS, using Amazon's Trainium chips. This binds Amazon's cloud infrastructure, Bezos' bet on the model layer, and Anthropic's research capacity into a triangle — it's more than just a financial investment. When Anthropic's valuation soared past $60 billion, Amazon had already secured the biggest external piece of the pie.

The second part is the scattered investments of Bezos Expeditions. Bezos Expeditions is raising a multibillion-dollar AI-specific fund, upgrading "Bezos' personal angel investing" into "institutional investing." For instance, it invested in Perplexity, an AI search company, whose valuation grew from $520 million in January 2024 to $20 billion in September 2025.

The third part is Project Prometheus.

In November 2025, Bezos and former Google X executive Vik Bajaj jointly announced the founding of this company, with $6.2 billion in starting capital and nearly 100 employees. Team members were recruited from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta. The founding advisor list includes Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit, the two authors of the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need." The company's goal is to apply AI to manufacturing, including automobiles, spacecraft, and chips.

Why manufacturing? Because it perfectly meshes with Bezos' other businesses. Amazon has the Kuiper satellite constellation; once manufacturing AI is realized, the first batch of customers would be within his own house.

Musk called Project Prometheus a "copycat" on X.

But structurally, it's not a copy.

Bezos holds the model layer through Anthropic, the application layer through Perplexity and Figure, and the computing layer through Amazon. Now, he's building Prometheus to integrate AI into manufacturing, also capturing the "execution layer of the physical world." This is a full-stack approach, with a hand in every layer, from training chips to deployment on factory floors.

About ten days after Project Prometheus launched, it quietly acquired a company called General Agents. This company builds "computer agents" — AI agents that can directly operate an entire computer. WIRED later disclosed that this acquisition, from start to finish, took only four days.

Harsha Abegunasekara, CEO of Donely (a competitor of General Agents), remarked: "What General Agents has truly cracked is speed. Ace runs almost instantaneously on your computer."

From angel investing to establishing a specialized fund, to personally taking on the CEO role, Bezos accomplished this in just 18 months. He is essentially building a system that is bigger than Amazon.

Powell Jobs: The Low-Key One

Looking at these three together, Powell Jobs is the one who least resembles an "AI investor."

According to data from the private wealth data platform Fintrx, cited by CNBC, her family office, Emerson Collective, has invested in at least 9 AI-related startups since 2022, with the total value of funding rounds it participated in exceeding $1 billion. Compared to Schmidt or Bezos, this is not on the same scale.

But the list itself is interesting.

Proximie: a remote surgery connection platform; Atropos Health: clinical data AI; Formation Bio: AI drug development; Curipod: an AI teaching tool from Norway; Mistral: a French large model company, Europe's only significant player against OpenAI.

No defense, no data centers, no rockets.

Emerson Collective's website clearly states its investment directions: education, energy & environment, digital health, fintech, media. AI is just a tool interspersed within these themes. She holds a majority stake in The Atlantic Monthly and is very skilled in the "Columbia-style soft power" investments.

But her truly winning bet was on a different track altogether.

After Jony Ive left Apple in 2019, Powell Jobs, through Emerson Collective, invested in his design company, LoveFrom. Ive later told the Financial Times in an interview: "If it weren't for Laurene, there wouldn't have been LoveFrom." A few years later, Ive founded another hardware company called io, specializing in AI devices, and Powell Jobs continued to invest. In May 2025, OpenAI acquired io for $6.4 billion in an all-stock deal, making Ive a billionaire on paper. Emerson Collective also cashed in on the deal.

Another equally critical investment: Emerson Collective was an early investor in Mistral AI. At the time, this French company was Europe's last remaining hope in the large model space.

Putting it all together, her AI bets focus on two directions: either "using AI to solve specific human problems" or "reinventing the way humans and machines interact" (via io's device, Ive's design).

VC Sheet described Emerson Collective in an assessment as: "a deliberately vague LLC, housing venture capital, philanthropy, policy advocacy, art, and media ownership under one roof, capable of using grants, policy lobbying, or investments — whichever tool is most effective."

Philosophically, she is closer to the older generation of East Coast family offices, where influence matters more than returns, the long-term more than the short-term, and the microphone more than the spotlight.

Three Investment Philosophies

Laying out the three lists side-by-side reveals three different judgments about the future of AI.

Schmidt is betting on national competition and infrastructure bottlenecks. In his world, AI will ultimately be determined by "who has the most electricity, the fastest rockets, and the most advanced drones." Models are just an entry ticket; the real moat is in the physical layer. That's why he personally went to lead Relativity and Bolt. He doesn't want returns; he wants control.

Bezos is betting on application diffusion on the scale of an Industrial Revolution. He believes AI will eventually permeate every machine tool, every aircraft, and every satellite, much like electricity did. So he locks down the model layer through Amazon, the manufacturing layer through Prometheus, and embeds into the consumer application layer through Expeditions. His bet isn't on whether a specific company will win, but whether "this entire structure" can win.

Powell Jobs is betting on something else. She is betting that people will eventually tire of the current human-computer interaction paradigm. In her Financial Times interview with Ive, she repeatedly emphasized that "humanity deserves better." Behind her investments in io, LoveFrom, healthcare AI, and education AI is the same judgment: the biggest market of the next decade will be "repairing the side effects the internet created in the previous decade."

Three judgments, three approaches.

Which one is right? No one knows. Schmidt might be overestimating the weight of geopolitics in the AI economy. Bezos might be underestimating the capital consumption of a "full-stack" asset-heavy model; a classic example is Prometheus hasn't even shipped a product yet, and rumors are already circulating that it needs to raise another $10 billion. Powell Jobs faces a more awkward problem: io's device won't reach mass production until 2027, and OpenAI's own financial model is already being repeatedly questioned by the market.

But one thing is certain. When the winners of the last internet generation collectively pivot their family funds towards AI, this is no longer a small trend within a specific track. Bolt has already raised $150 million in startup capital, and Anthropic alone has consumed the $33 billion committed by Amazon. Capital flows of this magnitude will themselves shape the industrial geography of the next decade.

As for who will laugh last, we'll have to look back in 2030. Until then, all three old-timers are still at the table, and the chips keep piling up.