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In the messy, public split of the Net-a-Porter founder Natalie Massenet and Erik Torstensson, no accusations seem off limits.

Erik Torstensson and Natalie Massenet didn’t just tell their love story. They branded it.

She was the superstar founder of luxury shopping site Net-a-Porter turned venture capitalist. He was a Swedish creative director who worked with the industry’s biggest names and co-founded a denim brand favored by supermodels.

Together, as fashion’s golden couple, they flew private and partied with people like Dasha Zhukova and Victoria Beckham. Ms. Massenet wore Valentino, Chanel and Oscar de la Renta; Mr. Torstensson was rarely without his Patek Philippe.

At galas and in interviews, they touted their love for each other’s style and minds, and extolled the way their personal and professional lives were intertwined, though they never married.

Speaking with The New York Times in 2023, Mr. Torstensson hailed Ms. Massenet as “the queen of everything,” describing her as “the smartest person in the world. And the kindest.”

“She literally doesn’t have a bad word to say about anyone,” he added.

That was before this summer, when he sent his friend Marcus Dunberg, a Swedish novelist and consultant, a text message that ended: “She’s going to war.”

On Aug. 20, their expertly curated life exploded in spectacular fashion when Ms. Massenet, 60, filed a lawsuit against Mr. Torstensson, 46, in California Superior Court in Los Angeles.

She accused him of conning her out of $95 million over the course of their relationship. She also said Mr. Torstensson used her for her money and her fashion connections, and then left her “cash strapped” by reneging on a promise to pay back her investment.

In her complaint, she said he had cheated on her almost from the beginning of their relationship, and that he had admitted to alcoholism, sex and drug addiction. Her suit said he regularly hired prostitutes. Offered as evidence were text messages said to be between Mr. Torstensson and a drug dealer, and between Mr. Torstensson and an unnamed woman who sent selfies to him, wearing lingerie.

Days after she filed the suit, the claims appeared in multiple news outlets in the United States and Britain.

This week, Mr. Torstensson filed a completely new suit in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan, where the family is based, this time with a claim for custody of the couple’s 7-year-old son that accused Ms. Massenet of being an unfit parent.

The suit, which has not been previously reported, also accuses Ms. Massenet of being a woman “who loved the limelight,” who used her power to “exert control of him,” and who retaliated against former colleagues who crossed her professionally. It claims she “used drugs regularly,” “ingested alcoholic beverages heavily,” adding that when under the influence, she sometimes “turned violent” with him. It concluded that all of this raises concerns about her “capability to provide responsible care” for their child.

Unlike her suit, his does not include text messages or supporting evidence, though both complaints offer a deluge of unflattering details.

He seeks legal custody of their child (and further relief as the court decides). She wants an unspecified amount of monetary damages (as the court decides).

He is painting her as a partying narcissist; she is depicting him as an amoral grifter.

Each claims the other was blinded by money.

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Bonnie Eskenazi, Mr. Torstensson’s lawyer, called Ms. Massenet’s suit “vengeful and obviously meritless without any regard to the harm it would cause their family.”

A spokesman for Ms. Massenet called Mr. Torstensson’s filing “an improper use” of the court process and “nothing more than a vindictive smear campaign in response to Natalie’s claim against him.”

Mr. Torstensson and Ms. Massenet both declined to be interviewed for this article. Their representatives declined to respond to questions about the allegations of substance use.

The collateral damage could include not only their young child but both of their reputations, and may drag in a number of businesses: Imaginary Ventures, the fund Ms. Massenet started with the venture capitalist Nick Brown in 2017 and which now has $1.5 billion invested in a range of companies; along with Frame (which Mr. Torstensson co-founded) and Skims, Kim Kardashian’s multi-billion-dollar brand (in which both Mr. Torstensson and Imaginary have invested).

As fashion shows begin in New York, the saga has consumed the industry. Interviews with dozens of the couple’s friends, few of whom wanted to talk on the record but most of whom wanted to talk, revealed the immediate reaction was sympathy for Ms. Massenet — Mr. Torstensson had seemingly behaved appallingly, and she was clearly in enormous pain — followed by shock that she had decided to go public the way she did. And a slew of questions about what really happened.

What did she mean, they wondered, when Ms. Massenet said she was “cash strapped,” as she put it in her lawsuit?

Had he really induced to her spend all that money?

Or were they mutually swept up in their own aspirations and illusions, as so many ambitious, creative types have been before?

The Beginning

The meet-cute Ms. Massenet and Mr. Torstensson liked to recount took place in London in 2009.

Long past her days as an editor at WWD and Tatler, she was now negotiating big deals at Net-a-Porter with brands such as Jimmy Choo, Alexander McQueen and Chloé.

Mr. Torstensson approached her with the idea for a men’s offshoot of the site; he had already thought of a brand, Mr. Porter, and purchased its domain name. She accepted his pitch and hired him to create it.

At the time, Ms. Massenet, who spent her childhood in Paris and moved to California at 11, lived in London with her husband, the French investment banker Arnaud Massenet, and their two young daughters. Net-a-Porter established her reputation as the seer who foretold the age of online luxury when conventional wisdom held that consumers would never buy expensive handbags they couldn’t touch.

She spoke at invite-only conferences like Google Zeitgeist where, she told the Financial Times in 2011, “I’m one of about 20 women and five fashion people out of the 400 there.” Her name would sometimes come up as a successor to Anna Wintour at Vogue.

Mr. Torstensson, 13 years her junior, had grown up on a farm in rural Sweden, where he spent his youth traveling the country as a competitive swing dancer. He was determined to get off the farm.

At age 23, he co-founded a creative agency in London called Saturday Group with another young Swede, Jens Grede. They began reeling in big clients, among them Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga and Chanel; Mr. Grede went on to co-found several brands in the Kardashian empire.

In 2010, Ms. Massenet sold Net-a-Porter to the luxury goods conglomerate Richemont, in a deal worth 350 million British pounds (approximately $525 million at the time). She netted a reported £50 million; the next year, she got divorced.

Though Mr. Torstensson and Ms. Massenet spoke publicly over the years about having been attracted to each other from the time they met, they maintained that their relationship was platonic until Ms. Massenet’s marriage ended.

In 2012, Mr. Torstensson and Mr. Grede started Frame, a Los Angeles-based denim brand that turned its skinny jeans into a $240 million a year business. And in 2013, Ms. Massenet took the reins of the British Fashion Council, reimagining the British Fashion Awards as a national version of the Met Gala. Friends said the couple seemed very much in love, their romance playing out at social affairs populated by royals, fashion titans and business magnates.

In 2015, for her 50th birthday, she brought 150 friends to Positano on Italy’s Amalfi Coast.

It was a weekend that “was unlike anything any of us had ever seen,” said Mr. Dunberg, Mr. Torstensson’s friend. “It was done in good taste, but it was just grand.” (In his lawsuit, Mr. Torstensson now says the event cost 3 million euros).

Just over a month later, and following Richemont’s agreement to merge Net-a-Porter with Yoox, another online site, Ms. Massenet resigned from the company she had founded. Though she had sold her stake for approximately 100 million British pounds, she was not a fan of the merger, according to reports. She later cast the experience as that of moneymen in suits bullying a female entrepreneur.

Meanwhile, Mr. Torstensson’s ascent continued. In 2016, the major advertising firm BBDO spent around $20 million to purchase a stake in Mr. Torstensson’s advertising and branding empire.

For her part, Ms. Massenet was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire for her services to the industry, and in 2017 she and Mr. Brown began Imaginary Ventures, which helped establish Ms. Massenet as a Sheryl Sandberg for the fashion set.

“She has been an unbelievable friend and unbelievably supportive of women in business,” said Tamara Mellon, the former impresario behind Jimmy Choo, the first brand to sign with Net-a-Porter.

“I’ve known her for 30 years, and she’s never not done what she says she is going to do,” she said.

By 2020, the couple were in the process of relocating to New York, where a massive renovation began on their $25.25 million townhouse on the Upper East Side. Then they scooped up the one next door and added it to their portfolio, which also included a vacation home on one of the swankiest stretches of the Hamptons, Further Lane, as well as Donhead House, the country estate Ms. Massenet had purchased and remodeled in Wiltshire, England.

(That home was the subject of a gleaming multi-page article in The Wall Street Journal’s magazine that showcased the Francis Bacon painting on their mantle.)

The couple loved to host. According to Ms. Mellon, Ms. Massenet always made “everybody feel welcome. She thinks about every detail.” A weekend spent at their English countryside estate typically involved a printed itinerary laid out on the guest beds, clothes provided by Ms. Massenet for themed costume parties — fairies or Ali G — and a “disco room.”

It was all like being in a movie directed by Ms. Massenet, Mr. Dunberg said. “You are in a supporting role. Erik is second lead. But it is Natalie’s show.”

The parties tended to run late and sometimes involved drug use, said others who attended. Both Ms. Massenet and Mr. Torstensson were known for being able to outlast their guests.

“We inspire each other,” Ms. Massenet told The New York Times in 2023.

Shattered Illusions

In good times, Ms. Massenet called Mr. Torstensson her “best investment.”

Now, Ms. Massenet’s suit positions Mr. Torstensson as a cunning Casanova whose sights were on her money, and who saw his “window of opportunity” to seduce her as she was separating from her husband. She claims his scheme was simple: to establish a business relationship with her, turn it romantic and use her network and finances to further his own aims.

According to Ms. Massenet’s suit, Mr. Torstensson promised her that “if she funded the extravagant lifestyle that he desired, introduced him to her high-profile business contacts, and supported his business ventures, he would repay her.”

Instead, she claims, he used his money to “rent flashy private planes” and buy “art to impress his peers.” As well as to “rack up investment and equity positions worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” all while cutting her out of “any potential earnings from her significant investment” in him over the duration of their relationship.

Mr. Torstensson’s suit portrays him as the submissive.

Their romance began, he claims, in 2009 on a flight to Milan, when Ms. Massenet turned to him and said, “Kiss me.”

She was still married at the time.

Things progressed from there. According to Mr. Torstensson’s suit, they had sex in her car outside her London home, while her daughters sat inside the house. He and Ms. Massenet had sex again in her car in Ibiza while she was on a family vacation.

Eventually, he says, Ms. Massenet went to the Hoffman Institute in California for a weeklong retreat, popular with celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Katy Perry, where people give up their cellphones and renegotiate their relationship with themselves. When it was over, Mr. Torstensson said, she decided to get divorced.

In short order, Mr. Torstensson says, he began to spend time at Ms. Massenet’s home in England with her and her daughters. They became a blended family.

He presents the publicity he and Ms. Massenet received in the ensuing years as an unwanted distraction from work. He says that he spent more than $20 million of his own money financing their lifestyle.

Ms. Massenet’s suit claims Mr. Torstensson urged her to make big real estate purchases because “it would improve his social profile and earnings potential, by allowing him to invite and impress his business associates.”

Her suit states that in 2025 Ms. Massenet discovered an “old phone” belonging to Mr. Torstensson that contained “indisputable evidence” that included “explicit texts and photographs” showing that Mr. Torstensson had “maintained multiple affairs with several younger women for years.” She said she also found proof that he had “purchased and used drugs including cocaine, ecstasy and oxycodone.”

For his part, Mr. Torstensson’s suit claims Ms. Massenet once overdosed on MDMA at the Glastonbury Festival. He claims she drank heavily and, under the influence, would sometimes “lash out physically,” including one interaction in which she “clawed” his arms “until they bled.”

As he presents things, he was the primary caregiver for the couple’s son, Jet, who was born in Los Angeles in 2017 via surrogate and egg donor.

Her lawsuit alleges that “he hired prostitutes in Los Angeles just days after the couple celebrated their son’s embryo being implanted with a surrogate.”

He alleges Ms. Massenet said sex was “only 25 percent of a relationship — I can do without it.”

She claims she has been “in intensive therapy and had to take off eight weeks of work following the shock of Torstensson’s misconduct.”

The Fallout

A spokesman for Ms. Massenet said her claim was “filed as a last resort, after many months of trying to persuade Erik to mediate privately and thoughtfully.”

Now, very little is private, and the fallout — both personal and professional — from the dueling lawsuits has already begun.

Almost immediately after Ms. Massenet’s lawsuit became public, Frame, Mr. Torstensson’s denim brand, announced he had “decided to step away from the company to attend to personal matters,” though he retains his ownership stake. The statement added that his alleged behavior did not reflect the brand’s values.

Skims, the body-conscious active wear brand, has begun distancing itself from both Mr. Torstensson and Ms. Massenet. In a brief statement, a spokeswoman for the company echoed that the behavior described in Ms. Massenet’s suit did not align with its corporate values and described Mr. Torstensson as a “very small early-stage, minority stakeholder.”

John Howard, a Skims board member, said of Ms. Massenet: “Natalie is not on the board and has been uninvolved in the business.”

Whether or not the former couple are essential to Skims’ success, however, its importance to them is hard to deny.

If Skims, which was estimated to be worth $4 billion in 2023, were to go public at a similar valuation it could provide a windfall of more than a $100 million for Mr. Torstensson — and even more for Imaginary, Ms. Massenet’s venture firm. (He has less than a 5 percent stake in the company; Imaginary has a 10 to 15 percent stake.) With plans for it to go public on hold because of market concerns, according to Mr. Howard, that money is largely out of reach.

Given the allegations about Mr. Torstensson’s drug use and sexual habits, said numerous industry observers, it might be hard for him to find marquee work, at least in the near future.

But in exposing Mr. Torstensson, they said, Ms. Massenet, whose job is reliant on her judgment calls, had also created problems for herself.

“She’s offered deals because she is Natalie Massenet,” said William Susman, a managing director at the investment bank Cascadia Capital. Now, though, he added: “I do think new investors would pause.”

Imaginary, whose investors had not been alerted to the lawsuit until after it was filed, said through a spokeswoman: “The leadership and team at Imaginary Ventures always conduct themselves with integrity and professionalism, and of course, alcohol and drug use is not permitted at work.”

The problem for both Mr. Torstensson and Ms. Massenet, Mr. Susman concluded, is that a lawsuit “is not the kind of statement you can take back.”

Huang’s competitive move ruffled feathers at large cloud providers—especially at AWS—that are Nvidia’s biggest customers.

The deals Nvidia made to rent its own chips for DGX Cloud served a dual purpose: making sure large enterprises could access Nvidia’s graphics processing units “without having to wait,” Huang said at the time, and boosting younger cloud providers such as CoreWeave and Lambda—which also provided AI chip servers to Nvidia for DGX Cloud.

Nvidia wanted to do deals with those younger providers to increase competition in the cloud market, partly at the expense of AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Those bigger clouds account for half of Nvidia’s revenue, increasing the risk that that chipmaker could end up relying too much on them. AWS, Google and Microsoft have also developed their own AI chips to lessen their reliance on Nvidia’s, posing a threat to Nvidia’s dominance.

By August 2023, Huang told investors that DGX Cloud was “an enormous success.” In late 2024, CFO Colette Kress said the company’s software business, a category she had said included DGX Cloud, was generating revenue at an annualized rate of $2 billion.

Now, though, Nvidia uses most of the DGX Cloud server capacity for its own internal efforts, according to the person with direct knowledge of the service. And in its most recent quarterly report, Nvidia stopped stating that its cloud spending commitments are partly for DGX Cloud, despite doing so in previous quarters. The disclosure change implied Nvidia was no longer prioritizing the service for external customers.

In an interview, Alexis Black Bjorlin, who runs DGX Cloud, disputed that Nvidia’s strategy had shifted. “Our internal researchers need significant computing, so do all of our customers,” she said. “So our strategy is still the same.”

DGX Cloud customers typically sign short-term contracts of less than a year, then find GPU servers to rent from a larger cloud provider, according to someone with direct knowledge.

For Nvidia, one benefit of renting GPU servers from cloud providers for its researchers is it won’t have to spend the money and time to set up data centers on its own.

Nvidia’s Other Cloud Play

Nvidia still wants some business customers to come to Nvidia to rent GPUs. Earlier this summer, Nvidia launched another kind of cloud service, DGX Cloud Lepton. Though similar to the original DGX Cloud, Lepton is a “marketplace” in which companies access GPUs from a network of cloud providers.

Cloud providers choose to list their available GPU server capacity on the marketplace, rather than Nvidia signing multi-year contracts to rent that capacity to customers the way it does with DGX Cloud.

The marketplace didn’t get off to a fast start. Executives at several of the cloud firms that are listed in the Nvidia Lepton marketplace said they viewed the new service as competitive to their own because it gives the chip designer direct relationships with their customers, The Information previously reported.

Representatives of two of the nearly two dozen cloud providers listed in the Lepton marketplace said they participated in the service because Nvidia asked them to be a part of a marketing push for it, not because they wanted to be a part of it.

Jenni Kayne’s eponymous brand returns to New York Fashion Week with a new proposition: color

Can a beige sweater be a gateway drug? First-time buyers of the brand Jenni Kayne often come for its bestselling $495 cashmere cocoon cardigans or other cozy, neutral knits, then return for different pieces and colors. Some start stocking their bathroom cabinets with Kayne’s clean skin-care line Oak Essentials. Others level up to filling their homes with the designer’s bouclé chairs and travertine coffee tables, or attend knitting circles and sip-and-shop events at one of the 31 Jenni Kayne stores across the country.

“I don’t even like calling it a brand,” said Grace Cohn, an entrepreneur and account executive who lives in downtown New York. “I feel like it’s a community, a lifestyle and a culture of empowered women.” Since setting foot in the Jenni Kayne store at Marin Country Mart, a luxury shopping center near her hometown in Northern California, a few years ago, Cohn has become one of the label’s very important customers. She’s a member of its monthly book club and recently splurged on a “big girl purchase,” a storage hutch made of burl-wood from the home line that retailed for $7,595.

It definitely is a brand. Jenni Kayne, the designer, has expanded the clothing line she started in 2002 at age 19 into a profitable business on track to make $140 million in revenue this year, the same as 2024, the brand said. She’s tapped into a customer base—mostly women in their 30s to 50s, Kayne says—willing to spend a little more on basics to look a little better. And after years diving deeper into her niche of cozy, California chic, she’s returning to New York Fashion Week this month for the first time in 14 years, tapping celebrity stylist Kate Young to show pieces that include big pants, striped sweaters and red suede slide sandals that echo The Row.

For Kayne the person, it wasn’t enough to create the uniform of an effortless California life—she wanted to build a whole world. The daughter of investor Richard Kayne and philanthropist Suzanne Kayne, the 42-year-old designer grew up in Los Angeles and never left. (Until last year’s $8 million series A investment round for Oak Essentials, her dad was her only investor.) “I was born and bred here. I love it. Seventy [degrees] and sunny,” said Kayne. “I don’t really know how to describe it more.”

When she started out, her fashion label was edgier: sequined miniskirts, suiting in loud colors, an occasional fur. In 2013, the brand had its first viral success with a more classic style: a pair of d’Orsay flats. “This really big Chinese blogger blogged about them and when I went into the store the next day, there were shoeboxes stacked to the ceiling [waiting to be shipped out],” she said. “Our manager thought we had been hacked.”

In the late 2010s, Kayne found her niche with the elevated basics that are beloved by her customers today: soft sweaters and flowy skirts and dresses, all of which come in shades like taupe, oatmeal, camel and warm ivory. Her brand is built around uniform dressing and the idea that most people pretty much wear the same things over and over again.

“I always say that everything that we do speaks one language,” Kayne said. “It’s always grounded in nature, always trying to find this kind of softness and neutrality. How do you want to feel in your home? I want to come in and kind of exhale. That’s what drives every category.”

Online reviews of her clothing are mixed; many complain about how quickly the sweaters pill. The brand says they use the highest quality materials but due to the delicate nature of cashmere, pilling may occur over time. Still, over 80% of first-time customers return to the brand. Meghan Markle and Jennifer Garner are fans.

Kayne was a driving force during the postpandemic “quiet luxury” boom, but that’s falling out of fashion in favor of color, maximalism and bold prints. She is making adjustments. For the last year, the designer said, her customers have been saying they want more color. As she prepares to return to New York Fashion Week, Kayne is delivering on that in her spring summer 2026 collection. “It’s a lot of mixing these bold colors in a way that maybe I wouldn’t have done on my own,” Kayne said.

Young, who is known for her classic styling on clients including Dakota Johnson, Julianne Moore and Scarlett Johansson, said of the brand’s appeal, “The clothes are not for a concept of a woman or a concept of a life that doesn’t exist. It’s nice to be in Jenni’s spaces and in her world.”

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After 12 months from the opening of the will and within 18 months at the most, Armani's Foundation, which inherits the company, could sell an initial 15 percent to either LVMH Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, EssilorLuxottica or L’Oréal.

MILAN – Giorgio Armani left not one but two wills, one dated March 15 and the other April 5.

They were made public on Friday morning on several media outlets. Accordingly, Armani, who died on Sept. 4 at 91, decided that his namesake foundation will manage the fashion group.

After 12 months from the opening of the will and within 18 months at the most, an initial 15 percent of the his namesake company could be sold to either LVMH Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, EssilorLuxottica or L’Oréal.

All three companies have over the years been rumored to have made ouvertures to Armani, but no deal ever materialized.

Pantaleo Dell’Orco, known as Leo, Armani’s longtime partner in charge of the men’s division, has a key role with 40 percent of voting shares.

Armani does not rule out other companies besides LVMH, EssilorLuxottica or L’Oréal as potential buyers, as long as they are operating in the world of fashion and luxury and of equal standing.

Between the third and fifth year, the plan is to sell a stake of between 30 and 54.9 percent to the same buyer of the first group of shares.

In the case that LVMH, EssilorLuxottica or L’Oréal are not willing to proceed with the acquisition, in five years and within eight, Armani stated that the a public listing should be considered, in Italy as a priority but also on other markets of equal standing. Even following the potential listing, the foundation would keep a 30.1 percent stake of the group to ensure its control.

Dell’Orco is part of the tight-knit circle of friends and collaborators that Armani called family. The designer’s closest relatives include his nephew Andrea Camerana, the son of Armani’s sister Rosanna, who also works in the company, and Roberta Armani, who is the daughter of the designer’s late brother, Sergio, and who has been in charge of the group’s celebrity relations for years, often acting as Armani’s deputy on social occasions around the world as the face of the company. Her sister Silvana is part of the design team.

Asked for a comment, EssilorLuxottica said: “We are proud of the trust that Mr. Armani has placed in our group and in our management. We will carefully evaluate, together with the board, this evolutionary prospect, which deserves thorough consideration in light of the deep ties that already unite the two groups.”

The designer revealed details about the future of his company for the first time in 2016, confirming he had established the long-rumored Giorgio Armani Foundation, which, while aiming to fund social projects, also ensured that his fashion group would live on.

Never leaving anything to chance, Armani carefully detailed the foundation’s guidelines in his will.

The foundation is expected to ensure that the activities will be managed “ethically, with moral integrity and correctly.”

The priority is to continue to develop the Armani name at a global level and abide by a “careful diversification strategy and segmentation of the different company brands maintaining consistency in design, image, product, and communication.” It is expected to stay true to “an essential modern, elegant and not ostentatious style with attention to detail and fit,” paying “attention to innovation, product excellence, quality and research.” The approach to acquisitions must be “cautious” and “aimed solely at the development of competences that do not exist internally from a market point of view, by product or channel.” The level of investments should be maintained adequate “for the continuous development of the brands,” and financial management should be “ balanced” with limited access to debt. Finally, profits should be adequately reinvested in the company with the goal to support cash generation in time.

Later on Friday, the executive committee of the Armani company issued a statement underscoring that “it is immediately clear” that the designer’s “intention to safeguard strategic continuity, corporate cohesion and financial stability for long-term development is confirmed at every stage, in line with what he had repeatedly shared with the press and his closest collaborators.”

While “all short- and medium-term strategic decisions” will be taken by Dell’Orco and the family, supported by the Fondazione, the statement highlights that “these decisions were guided by Mr Armani himself, both in terms of the brand’s mission and in possible actions with implications for the Group’s medium- and long-term structure. In this light, the will makes reference to a stock market listing as well as the opening to a minority partner of recognised standing and genuine interest in the brand. The responsibility for decisions and management of this process will remain with Mr Dell’Orco and the family, under the guidance of the Fondazione, but always within the principles and rules defined by Mr Armani.”

The Fondazione’s first duty will be to propose the name of the new chief executive officer.

“In the coming days, with a thorough reading of the documents and the publication of the company’s new Articles of Association, the remaining details of Mr Armani’s wishes will be clarified,” concluded the statement. “However, even now, we affirm, also on behalf of employees and collaborators, our commitment to supporting this path in full respect of his wishes, united by the shared goal of securing the best possible future for the company and the brand, in accordance with the principles he established.”

Back in 2016, Armani explained that he decided to create the foundation “in order to implement projects of public and social interest. The foundation will also safeguard the governance assets of the Armani Group and ensure that these assets are kept stable over time, in respect of and consistent with some principles that are particularly important to me and that have always inspired my activities as a designer and an entrepreneur.”

While vocal over the years about his aversion to sell, take on a business partner or publicly list the company, rumors about Armani contemplating forming a foundation first emerged in 2012. The foundation reflected a key priority for Armani — independence, which he sought to maintain over the years, especially since 2000 when rumors about a possible sale to LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton or the-then Gucci Group and L’Oréal swirled around the fashion house.

At the historic Palace Hotel in San Francisco, Goldman Sachs is wrapping up three and half days of its annual Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference.

Attendees were mostly in a buoyant mood, but not because this week is on track to be the biggest of the year for initial public offerings. Instead, the biggest pop during the conference came from Oracle, a 48-year-old tech stalwart, whose stock jumped 36% on news that its future contract revenue would soar 359%, mostly due to a deal with OpenAI.

Nvidia and OpenAI were the two hottest tickets in the Palace Hotel. Both presented shortly after lunch, so eager investors claimed the good seats and sent their colleagues to grab lunch boxes. The main ballroom was full 20 minutes before the presentation and attendees filled three overflow rooms. Meta and Alphabet only filled two overflow rooms.

For companies that don’t build artificial intelligence data centers, make AI chips or develop AI models, the mood was less optimistic. Software makers in particular were put under the microscope for their AI progress or the lack of it.

“We're in a phase where software companies felt that they had to change their narrative very quickly because customers were demanding it,” said Matt Lucas, managing director of Goldman Sachs’ tech, media and telecom investment banking group.

Software companies were given a friendly greeting on stage by Kash Rangan, a Goldman Sachs managing director and software analyst. “AI is not going to kill software, but it's actually going to make software a flourish,” he said Monday when he introduced Confluent, which provides data streaming and analytics services.

Investors don’t share his enthusiasm. Several of them told me they had simple questions for software makers: how are customers using AI and are they paying for it, or will they soon?

Some companies did answer some of those questions. Investors told me that customer engagement software maker Twilio discussed in a closed-door session how revenue will pick up from tools that help power AI agents to transcribe text to speech. It also disclosed $260 million in 12-month revenue from AI startups in its January Investor Day, but didn’t provide an update here or in last quarter’s earnings.

“As of last quarter, our 10 largest AI startup customers that were founded in the last three years, are all spending at a six-figure revenue run rate, and a few have eclipsed a seven-figure revenue run rate,” a Twilio spokesperson said.

Dating app Grindr said its latest AI features would help drive premium subscriptions. CEO George Arison said AI would scan all conversations on the site to generate a list of hot prospects for Grindr’s premium subscriber-only A-list.

“It’s clear that corporates are still figuring out how AI is going to change their businesses and at what pace,” Lucas said in an interview. “That's creating some strategic tension within software companies as they consider opportunities to transform.”

Google’s cloud chief Thomas Kurian grabbed the audience’s attention when he said Google “made billions already using AI.” He gave details about how the company was monetizing AI and showed off who is buying their AI infrastructure and agents’ offerings. The audience took photos of almost every slide Kurian showed.

The other lovefest was between investors and database companies like Databricks, Snowflake and MongoDB. Their role in AI is clear: to support the AI infrastructure, to categorize the massive data AI generates, and query and analyze that data.

Shares of Snowflake are up 43% this year and shares of MongoDB by 37%. Databricks just raised a $1 billion round and disclosed recently passing $1 billion in annualized revenue from AI products.