One would have to think he’s having second thoughts. Attaching himself to a sinking ship would torpedo his legacy.

I doubt that comes into it. Ive wants to design what he wants to design, whether people like that universally or not is clearly not a concern to him. Everyone hated the MacBook keyboards for years, the lack of ports, the iPhone not getting USB-C until a decade late, whatever the Magic Mouse is, etc. Ive is just ungrounded from what people want, 20% of the time he knows better and changes the industry, 80% of the time it just annoys people.

He probably gets to be a billionaire if OpenAI floats which would be nice.