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18 famous people name-dropped in The New Yorker's Jony Ive profile

18 famous people name-dropped in The New Yorker's Jony Ive profile

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Apple designer Jony Ive is very famous, and he has very famous friends. So many famous friends, in fact, that stretches of today's New Yorker profile read like a Hollywood guest list. Below, we've put together a reference of each of the famous friends, annotated by their relationship to Ive. (For brevity's sake, we've left off actual Apple employees like Jimmy Iovine and Marc Newson, many of whom are also quite famous.)

Friends of Ive:
Coldplay's Chris Martin
Stephen Fry
Paul Smith (they write postcards to each other)
JJ Abrams (Ive is an unofficial lightsaber consultant)
Paola Antonelli, curator at The Museum of Modern Art
Massive Attack
Ann Getty and Larry Ellison (Ive's two neighbors at his California home)
British DJ John Digweed
Bono
Prince Charles (Ive and Jobs once spent a morning at his country house)
Yo-Yo Ma (the exact quote: "he is also a friend of Yo-Yo Ma")

There are also a few loose celebrities encountered at Apple events, who aren't really Friends of Ive, but travel in the same circles and could be considered Friends in Waiting. One assume they would be his friend if he had the emotional bandwidth for that right now:

Rupert Murdoch
Kevin Durant
Marissa Mayer
Sean Combs
Lily Cole
Olivier Zahm

To his credit, Ive is never the one actually dropping the name, but faced with this many noteworthy pen pals, a writer just can't help himself. The barrage of celebrity is bewildering at first, but after a while it settles into a kind of fame-addled dream logic. Of course he's friends with Yo-Yo Ma! Why wouldn't he be? Yo-Yo Ma is delightful. Life is very different when you're the world's most famous industrial designer.