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

Original Author: TechFlow

On November 17, 2025, 61-year-old Jeff Bezos became the CEO of a company again. It was his first return to an operational role since stepping down from Amazon in 2021. The new company is called Project Prometheus, 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 appointed himself CEO. He didn't explain why he was diving back in at his age; 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 io, the 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 player worn around the neck. Her assessment of the prototype: "Seeing 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, the top money in Silicon Valley has been doing almost the same thing: pouring funds from family offices, venture capital, and charitable foundations all into AI. Schmidt, Bezos, and Powell Jobs are just the three most prominent figures. But if you carefully dissect their target lists, you'll find they're not in 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 over $5 billion. The list includes Anthropic, SandboxAQ (a quantum+AI company spun off from Alphabet), Inworld AI, Holistic AI, and Altera. These are the targets that "people in the industry" would list.

But what truly reveals his colors is another list.

White Stork: a company producing AI drones in Ukraine. Rebellion Defense: defense AI. Istari: modeling and simulation. 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 is a player who handles AI policy, defense procurement, and energy infrastructure as one integrated matter. In January 2024, Forbes revealed that he simultaneously launched White Stork's drone project in the US and Ukraine, using the Ukrainian battlefield as a "laboratory for AI weapons."

Then came 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 rent server space or buy grid electricity; 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 households. Texas Pacific Land contributed $50 million, along with priority water rights. In an email reply to Fortune, Schmidt said: "The biggest bottleneck facing AI is not algorithms; it's energy."

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

Putting these pieces together, the logic becomes very clear.

Schmidt doesn't believe in the strategy of "investing in a basket of large model companies." He believes AI's outcome will ultimately depend on three things: compute 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 open-source investment. 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 op-ed in The Washington Post, calling it a "turning point in the global AI race." His prescription was not retreat but doubling down, including 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 himself is standing on the sidelines while simultaneously serving on the organizing committee. Coming out as CEO of Relativity at 70 might seem like a hassle to outsiders, but he explained it himself: Kissinger worked until he was 100, and "times of great change require responsibility, not stepping away."

Bezos: The Full-Stack Control Freak

Bezos' approach is completely different from Schmidt's.

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

Breaking it down, it mainly consists of three parts.

First is Anthropic. Amazon began investing in September 2023, contributing $8 billion initially, and committed an additional up to $25 billion in April 2026. Anthropic runs on AWS, using Amazon's Trainium chips. This ties Amazon's cloud infrastructure, Bezos's model-level bet, and Anthropic's research capacity into a triangle, making it more than just a financial investment. When Anthropic's valuation soared past $60 billion, Amazon had already secured the largest external piece of the pie.

Second is Bezos Expeditions' scattered investments. Bezos Expeditions is raising a multi-billion dollar AI-focused fund, upgrading "Bezos' personal angel investing" into an "institutional investor" model. Among its investments is Perplexity, an AI search company whose valuation grew from $520 million in January 2024 to $20 billion by September 2025.

Third is Project Prometheus.

In November 2025, Bezos and former Google X executive Vik Bajaj jointly announced the founding of this company. It has $6.2 billion in starting capital, a team of nearly 100 people recruited from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta. The founding advisor list includes 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 meshes with Bezos' other businesses. Amazon has the Kuiper satellite constellation; the first customers for manufacturing AI applications are within his own ecosystem.

Musk called Project Prometheus a "copycat" on X.

But structurally, this is not plagiarism.

Bezos holds the model layer through Anthropic, the application layer through Perplexity and Figure, and the compute layer through Amazon. Now he's creating Prometheus, integrating AI into manufacturing and capturing the "execution layer of the physical world." It's a full-stack approach, holding cards at every level, 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 creates "computer agents," AI agents capable of directly operating an entire computer. WIRED later revealed that the acquisition went from start to finish in just four days.

Donely's CEO, Harsha Abegunasekara, commented: "What General Agents truly cracked is speed; Ace runs almost instantaneously on your computer." His own company was a competitor of General Agents.

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

Powell Jobs: The Low-Key Player

Looking at these three individuals together, Powell Jobs is the least like 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, participating in funding rounds totaling over $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-driven drug development; Curipod: an AI teaching tool from Norway; Mistral: a large model company from France, Europe's primary player against OpenAI.

No defense, data centers, or rockets.

Emerson Collective's website clearly states its investment directions: education, energy and environment, digital health, financial technology, and media. AI is just a tool interspersed within these themes. She holds a majority stake in The Atlantic and is very skilled at Colombian-style "soft power" investing.

But her truly significant bet was entirely different from the others.

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, there would be no LoveFrom at all." A few years later, Ive founded a 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.

Another investment was equally crucial. Emerson Collective was an early investor in Mistral AI, at a time when this French company was Europe's last remaining hope in large models.

Putting it all together, her AI bets cluster around two directions: either "using AI to solve specific human problems" or "reshaping the interaction mode between humans and machines" (io's devices, Ive's design).

VC Sheet described Emerson Collective in an assessment as: "A deliberately ambiguous LLC that houses venture capital, philanthropy, policy advocacy, art, and media ownership under one roof, able to deploy 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 matters more than the short term, and the microphone matters more than the spotlight.

Three Investment Philosophies

Lining up the three lists reveals three distinct judgments about the future of AI.

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

Bezos is betting on application diffusion at the scale of an industrial revolution. He believes AI will eventually permeate every machine tool, every aircraft, and every satellite, like electricity. So he locks down the model layer through Amazon, the manufacturing layer through Prometheus, and the consumer application layer through Expeditions. He isn't betting on whether a specific company can win, but whether the "entire structure" can succeed.

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

Three judgments, three strategies.

Which one is right? No one knows. Schmidt may overestimate the weight of geopolitics in the AI economy. Bezos may underestimate the capital consumption of a heavy asset "full-stack" model; a typical example is Prometheus hasn't shipped yet and is already rumored to need another $10 billion. Powell Jobs faces an even more awkward question: io's device 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 turn their family funds towards AI, this is no longer a small trend in a specific track. Bolt has already raised $150 million in startup capital; Anthropic alone has absorbed the $33 billion promised by Amazon. Capital flows of this magnitude will shape the industrial geography of the next decade.

As for who will have the last laugh, we'll have to look back in 2030. Until then, the three old-timers are still at the poker table, and the stakes are still being raised.