Linked List: July 12, 2022

Tuesday, 12 July 2022

NYT: Consulting Agreement Ends Between Apple and Jony Ive’s LoveFrom ★

Tripp Mickle, with a scoop for The New York Times:

Mr. Ive and Apple have agreed to stop working together, according to two people with knowledge of their contractual agreement, ending a three-decade run during which the designer helped define every rounded corner of an iPhone and guided development of its only new product category in recent years, the Apple Watch.

When Mr. Ive left Apple in 2019 to start his own design firm, LoveFrom, the iPhone maker signed a multiyear contract with him valued at more than $100 million. That made Apple his firm’s primary client, people with knowledge of the agreement said.

The deal restricted Mr. Ive from taking on work that Apple found competitive and ensured that the designer would inform the development of future products, such as an augmented-reality headset that it is expected to ship next year, the people said.

In recent weeks, with the contract coming up for renewal, the parties agreed not to extend it. Some Apple executives had questioned how much the company was paying Mr. Ive and had grown frustrated after several of its designers left to join Mr. Ive’s firm. And Mr. Ive wanted the freedom to take on clients without needing Apple’s clearance, these people said.

It remains unclear (to me at least) how much Ive (and LoveFrom) have been involved with Apple over the last three years, so it’s unclear whether the lapsing of this formal consulting agreement is largely symbolic, or if it marks a true parting of the ways.

Update: I’m hearing, from a few sources, that LoveFrom’s involvement with Apple has been more than symbolic over the past three years — which makes sense! — and that Apple folks have been reviewing new product designs with Ive as recently as a few months ago. This story in The New York Times is the first a lot of people inside Apple have heard about the purported breakup.

Update 2: A better question: Which side leaked this to Mickle? I’m thinking it was someone at Apple, not LoveFrom. The begrudgingness regarding LoveFrom’s high consulting fees certainly makes it sound like the leak came from Apple. Not a strategic leak, necessarily, but perhaps just someone at Apple who has Mickle’s ear. Strategically, I think Apple would have preferred to let the dissolution of this partnership go unnoticed. But it’s an interesting question.

First Images From NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope ★

It’s always exciting to see new images like these, but a win for science feels especially good right now. Richard Dawkins:

Looking back, science extends our vision to the origin of time itself. Looking forward, science offers us our only hope that we’ll have a forward to look to.

The One Good Thing About the Elon Musk Twitter Acquisition Saga: Matt Levine’s Coverage ★

Matt Levine:

So this April, Musk announced that he wanted to buy Twitter Inc. Why not? Musk seems to get a lot of joy out of using Twitter, and pretending to buy Twitter is a good way to create drama on Twitter. At the time, I assumed that, as with Tesla, he was doing a bit. “Ordinarily,” I wrote, “if a billionaire chief executive officer of a public company offers to buy a company, the odds that he is kidding are quite low. When it’s Elon Musk, the historical odds are, like, 50/50.”

But he surprised me by quickly lining up financing (paying millions of dollars of fees to banks for commitment letters) and signing a merger agreement with Twitter. If he was pretending he was going to buy Twitter, those were pretty elaborate lengths to go to? But he frequently goes to elaborate (and expensive) lengths for a joke — he sold 20,000 branded flamethrowers to make a joke about flamethrowers, and also founded Boring Co. to make a joke (???) about tunnels — so who knows. Would he line up billions of dollars of financing and sign a binding merger agreement with a specific-performance clause and a $1 billion breakup fee as a joke? I mean! Nobody else would! But he might! [...]

Still, one should remain open to the possibility that he was kidding when he first signed the deal. “Elon Musk had a well-thought-out business and financial plan for Twitter that worked in the economic conditions of early April 2022, but conditions have changed and the model no longer works” does not strike me as the most plausible description of what is going on here. “Elon Musk whimsically thought it might be fun to own Twitter, so he signed a merger agreement without taking it too seriously and then lost interest a week later” feels more true to the situation. My first reaction to his proposal to buy Twitter, that it was a joke, may have been the correct one. He was just a lot more committed to the bit than I expected.

I am so tired of this whole bizarre saga but I seemingly will never tire of Levine’s entertaining and insightful coverage of it. Here’s just one interesting thought from a column full of them:

The fact that Musk is working in such bad faith here — that he seems so unconcerned with law and the contract he signed — cuts both ways. On the one hand, it will certainly annoy a Delaware chancellor; Delaware likes to think of itself as a stable place for corporate deals, with predictable law and binding contracts, and Musk’s antics undermine that. On the other hand it might intimidate a Delaware chancellor: What if the court orders Musk to close the deal and he says no? They’re not gonna put him in Chancery jail. The guy is pretty contemptuous of legal authority; he thinks he is above the law and he might be right. A showdown between Musk and a judge might undermine Delaware corporate law more than letting him weasel out of the deal would.