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

Original Author: TechFlow by Shenzhen

On November 17, 2025, 61-year-old Jeff Bezos became the CEO of a new company. It was the first time he had returned to a hands-on leadership role since stepping down from Amazon in 2021. The new company, Project Prometheus, launched with $6.2 billion in initial funding, focusing on "Physical AI" and targeting the manufacturing sector.

Seven months earlier, 70-year-old Eric Schmidt took control of a rocket company called Relativity Space and became its CEO. He didn't explain why he was stepping into the fray at his age. Perhaps "every day matters in the age of AI" 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 talked about a prototype she saw at the io company. It was an "AI device" acquired by OpenAI for $6.4 billion in stock. It had no screen and was reportedly shaped like a music player you could wear around your neck. Her assessment of the prototype was: "Watching an idea become reality is an incredible thing."

Three people, three postures. But they are all placing their bets in the same casino.

Over the past three years, almost all of Silicon Valley's top money has been doing the same thing: funneling funds from family offices, venture capital, and charitable foundations into AI. Schmidt, Bezos, and Powell Jobs are just the most prominent three. But if you look closely at their target lists, you'll find it's not the same game. They are betting on three completely different futures.

Schmidt: 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 "people in the industry" would list.

But it's another list that truly reveals his character.

White Stork: A company producing AI drones in Ukraine. Rebellion Defense: Defense AI. Istari: Simulation. Swift Beat: Military software. This is a family office that treats 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 is a player who treats AI policy, defense procurement, and energy infrastructure as one single issue. In January 2024, Forbes revealed he launched the White Stork drone project simultaneously 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, becoming its chairman. This company doesn't lease server rooms or buy grid power. It plans to build its own natural gas power plants in the wilderness of West Texas, feeding electricity directly into data centers. The plan is to start with 1 gigawatt and eventually reach 10 gigawatts, equivalent to the electricity consumption of 7 million homes. Texas Pacific Land contributed $50 million, along with priority rights to water resources. In an email reply to Fortune, Schmidt said: "The biggest bottleneck AI faces is not algorithms, it's energy."

In March of the same year, he took control of Relativity Space. The company is building a reusable rocket called Terran R, aiming to challenge SpaceX's monopoly in medium-to-low orbit launches. It had $2.9 billion in orders at the time.

Putting it all together, the logic becomes very clear.

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

His reaction to DeepSeek is very telling. Shortly after DeepSeek's release in early 2025, Schmidt immediately wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post, calling it a "turning point in the global AI race." His prescription wasn't to retreat, but to double down: more open source, more Stargate-like infrastructure, and more shared training methods between model labs.

In other words, he views AI as an endurance race between nations, and he's already standing on the sidelines, also serving as a committee member. Becoming the CEO of Relativity at 70 might look like a lot of fuss to outsiders, but as he himself explained: Kissinger worked until he was 100. "Times of major transformation require responsibility, not stepping back."

Bezos: The Full-Stack Control Freak

Bezos's approach is completely different from Schmidt's.

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

Breaking it down, it mainly falls into three parts.

The first is Anthropic. Amazon invested $8 billion starting in September 2023, and in April 2026, it pledged an additional $25 billion. Anthropic runs on AWS, using Amazon's Trainium chips. This ties Amazon's cloud infrastructure, Bezos's bet on the model layer, and Anthropic's research capacity into a triangle, making it more than just a financial investment. When Anthropic's valuation soared to over $60 billion, Amazon had already grabbed the biggest external slice of the pie.

The second is Bezos Expeditions' scattered investments. Bezos Expeditions is raising an AI-specific fund worth several billion dollars, upgrading the "Bezos personal angel" into an "institutional investor." Among its investments is Perplexity, an AI search company, whose valuation grew from $520 million in January 2024 to $20 billion in September 2025.

The third 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 initial funding, nearly 100 employees, team members poached from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta, and a founding advisory list including Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit, 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 aligns with Bezos's other businesses. Amazon has the Kuiper satellite constellation; once manufacturing AI is deployed, its first customers are within his own house.

Musk called Project Prometheus a "copycat" on X.

But structurally, it's not plagiarism.

Bezos holds the model layer through Anthropic, the application layer through Perplexity and Figure, and the computing power 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, holding cards at every level, from training chips to the factory floor.

About 10 days after Project Prometheus launched, it quietly acquired a company called General Agents. This company makes "computer agents"—AI agents that can directly operate an entire computer. WIRED later revealed that the acquisition took only four days from start to finish.

Harsha Abegunasekara, CEO of Donely, commented: "What General Agents really cracked was speed. Ace runs almost instantly on your computer." His company was originally a competitor of General Agents.

From angel investing to forming a specialized fund, to personally becoming CEO, it only took Bezos 18 months. He is essentially building a system larger than Amazon.

Powell Jobs: The Low-Profile Player

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

According to CNBC, citing data from private wealth data platform Fintrx, her family office, Emerson Collective, has invested in at least 9 AI-related startups since 2022, participating in funding rounds totaling over $1 billion. This is not on the same scale as Schmidt or Bezos.

But the list itself is interesting.

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

No defense, no data centers, no rockets.

The Emerson Collective website clearly states its investment directions: education, energy & environment, digital health, fintech, and media. AI is just a tool interspersed within these themes. She holds a majority stake in The Atlantic and is very skilled at 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: "If it weren't for Laurene, LoveFrom wouldn't exist." A few years later, Ive founded another hardware company called io, specializing in AI devices, and Powell Jobs continued investing. 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.

Another equally crucial investment: Emerson Collective was an early investor in Mistral AI. At the time, this French company was Europe's last remaining beacon in large language models.

Putting these together, her AI bets are concentrated in two directions: either "using AI to solve specific human problems" or "reshaping the way humans interact with machines" (io's devices, Ive's design).

VC Sheet described Emerson Collective in an assessment as: "A deliberately vague LLC that houses 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's 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 megaphone more than the spotlight.

Three Investment Philosophies

Looking at the three lists side by side, you see 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, who has the fastest rockets, who has the strongest drones." Models are just entry tickets; the real moat is in the physical layer. That's why he personally went to lead Relativity and Bolt. He's not looking for returns; he wants control.

Bezos is betting on industrial revolution-level application proliferation. He believes AI will eventually permeate every machine tool, every aircraft, every satellite, just like electricity. So he locks in the model layer through Amazon, the manufacturing layer through Prometheus, and the consumer application layer through Expeditions. His bet isn't on whether a specific company will win, but on whether "this entire structure" can win.

Powell Jobs is betting on something else. She is betting that people will eventually grow intolerant of the current human-computer interaction model. She and Ive kept repeating in their Financial Times interview that "humanity deserves better." Her investments in io, LoveFrom, medical AI, and education AI all stem from the same judgment: the biggest market of the next decade will be "fixing the side effects of the internet from the last decade."

Three judgments, three approaches.

Which one is right? No one knows. Schmidt might overestimate the weight of geopolitics in the AI economy. Bezos might underestimate the capital consumption of the "full-stack" asset-heavy model; a classic example is Prometheus hasn't even shipped yet, and rumors are already circulating that it needs to raise another $10 billion. Powell Jobs faces an even more awkward question: io's devices won't be mass-produced 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 shift their family funds toward AI, this is no longer just a small trend in some niche sector. Bolt already raised $150 million in initial funding, and Anthropic alone has consumed Amazon's promised $33 billion. 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 are still being raised.