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TBPN · 4 min · Jul 13, 2026

OpenAI held a stake in IO before acquiring it

Mark Gurman · Managing editor of consumer technology & chief correspondent for Apple, Bloomberg

Mark Gurman says OpenAI already held a 25% stake in IO before the acquisition became public.

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  3. 51:15Live events can endure because human experience mattersPro pick 4 min
  4. 2:05:57OpenAI held a stake in IO before acquiring it4 min
  5. 2:09:38Apple plans to pass memory costs on to iPhone buyers3 min
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“OpenAI already owned 25% of IO, if I remember correctly, for a year or maybe more before the acquisition of OpenAI buying IO was announced.”
Mark Gurmanat 2:08:52 · TBPN
2:08:52

Takeaways

  1. OpenAI reportedly held 25% of IO before announcing the acquisition.
  2. Apple split Tan’s responsibilities across five or six people.
  3. Gurman says IO’s origin story likely anticipated an OpenAI acquisition.

About this segment

Mark Gurman says OpenAI already held a 25% stake in IO before the acquisition became public. He says Apple had to divide Tang Tan’s responsibilities among five or six people after his departure.

Mark Gurman

Managing editor of consumer technology & chief correspondent for Apple, Bloomberg

Broke news on major Apple hardware, software releases and initiatives, and writes Bloomberg’s Power On column.

  • John Coogan, Host · Co-host, TBPN

    Co-founded Soylent and Lucy; OpenAI bought his show TBPN in April 2026.

  • Jordi Hays, Host · Co-host, TBPN

    Founded Branded Native; co-founded fintech Capital, which Rho bought.

From “Apple vs OpenAI, Mustard Controversy, Mark Gurman, Alexis Ohanian, & Morgan Housel Join”, Jul 13, 2026. Watch the full episode

Transcript

From the transcript TBPN publishes with the episode.

  1. 2:06:05

    Yeah. Can you take us back in time to, Johnny Ive's departure, the birth of IO, how that was perceived within Apple? Because it feels like when the acquisition happened, was 55 employees at IO at the time. A lot of them ex Apple. And Ben Thompson pointed out that he said, I think Apple feels betrayed not just by Tan, but also Johnny Ive. Start with the fact that Ive framed his partnership with OpenAI as an attempt to undo the harms he thought were caused by the smartphone, not exactly a ringing endorsement. So you see these, you know, people leave and then they're like, oh, like, you know, we need we need an antidote to the social media thing. This is a common a common thread that that people pull on in their second act of their career. But what was the IO journey? Was it pretty smooth when that happened?

  2. 2:06:53

    Was this something like, if if you play out a different scenario and IO is just consulting for, you know, a Samsung and Ferrari. Know, Ferrari and a bunch of other, you know, companies that are not, like, directly at each other's throats, new hyperscalers, a disruptive AI take off, all of that. How what how does the story look then?

  3. 2:07:12

    So the story well, let's I'm not going to get into the Johnny I stuff right now, but Sure. You know, Tang Tan, he tells John Turnis. By the way, the other side of this thing is him and Turnis hate each other. Mhmm. Happy to go into that. Mhmm. But Turnis, you know, he was up for the SVP of hardware job in 2020. Tang Tan and a lot of the people at Apple who now are at IO and at OpenAI, they wanted Tang to be the new head of hardware engineering because they enjoyed working with him on the product design side of things, and the ID studio and product design worked very closely together. Tang had run the iPhone side of things. Ternis for a number of years was running the iPad and the Mac side of things. He had felt that a lot of the core technologies that Tang was working on, you know, they got iPhone priority, and he didn't really want to share that with the iPad and the Mac team.

  4. 2:08:04

    You know, now Ternist and Cook are sort of getting the last laugh, sort of, you know, giving Tang that reputation that he's not going to ever be able to draw of being someone who's sort of, they didn't say the words, but a ringleader around this. So what happened. He tells Apple at the end of twenty three he's leaving. Ternus lets him stick around through February '24 because Tang's role at Apple was so big. He had his tentacles in so many different things.

  5. 2:08:32

    They actually had to replace him by splitting up his responsibilities, if I remember correctly, across five or six or seven different people. Wow. So it took a lot of time to unwind. He behind the scenes was already working with Johnny Ive and Sam Altman and some of these other folks on creating this company. I think the origin story of IO was they knew all along that they were going to get acquired by OpenAI.

  6. 2:08:53

    The other part, and this sort of got buried when OpenAI acquired IO, But like OpenAI already owned 25% of IO, if I remember correctly, for a year or maybe more before the acquisition of OpenAI buying IO was announced. So that's pretty interesting. That's very interesting. Neither here nor there, IO, they're building some of the best talent who's ever worked at Apple. Combining the best talent that's ever worked at Apple with the AI acumen of OpenAI as a scary sight, I would say.

  7. 2:09:30

    Mhmm. Oh, no. They're gonna have to pivot to a VR headset. My dream. I just want another VR headset.