Joichi "Joi" Ito (伊藤 穰一, Itō Jōichi, born June 19, 1966) is a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist.

[9] Following the exposure of his personal and professional financial ties to sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein, Ito resigned from his roles at MIT, Harvard, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, PureTech Health, and The New York Times Company on September 7, 2019.

His family moved to Canada and then to the United States, when Ito was about three, to a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, where his father became a research scientist[12] and his mother a secretary for Energy Conversion Devices, Inc., now Ovonics.

The founder of his mother's company, Stanford R. Ovshinsky, was impressed with young Ito, whom he thought of almost as his son.

Ovshinsky mentored the boy's interests in technology and social movements, and when Ito was 13, gave him work with scientists, saying, "He was not a child in the conventional sense.

[14] Ito returned to the United States to attend Tufts University as a computer science major, where he met, among others, Pierre Omidyar, later founder of eBay.

[13] In the fall of 1985, Ito became the first student to register for a pioneering program of online courses, offered by Connected Education, Inc., for undergraduate credit from The New School for Social Research.

[18] Ito received a doctorate by thesis The Practice of Change from the Graduate School of Media and Governance of Keio University in 2018.

[14] Later, Ito ran a nightclub in Roppongi, Japan, called XY Relax, with help from Joe Shanahan of Metro Chicago/Smart Bar.

He helped bring industrial music from Chicago (Wax Trax) and later the rave scene, managing a DJ team and visual artists, including importing Anarchic Adjustment to Japan.

a doctoral candidate in Business Administration focusing on the sharing economy at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University.

[40] Ito has written op-eds for the Asian Wall Street Journal[41] and The New York Times[42][43] and has published articles in numerous other magazines[44] and newspapers.

He has authored and co-authored a number of books including Dialog – Ryu Murakami X Joichi Ito with Ryu Murakami, and "Freesouls: Captured and Released" with Christopher Adams, a book of Ito's photographs that includes essays by several prominent figures in the free culture movement.

He was also named one of the 50 "Stars of Asia" in the "Entrepreneurs and Dealmakers" category by BusinessWeek[53] and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT in 2000.

[60] In 2011, with Ethan Zuckerman, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers, in which he stated the Best idea is "Users controlling their own data".

[69] In April 2011, Ito was named the director of the MIT Media Lab; he began in this role on September 1, 2011.

[86] The president of MIT requested an "immediate, thorough and independent" investigation into the "extremely serious" and "deeply disturbing allegations about the engagement between individuals at the Media Lab and Jeffrey Epstein.

"[87] In September 2019, Ito resigned as director of the Media Lab and as an MIT professor shortly after The New Yorker article.

[5] in addition he relinquished a number of other roles on September 7 amid the controversy: On January 10, 2020, MIT released results of its fact-finding on engagements with Jeffrey Epstein.

However, the report also states that certain members of MIT's Senior Team "were aware of, and approved, Epstein's donations to support Ito and the Media Lab."

In December 2021, Ito was appointed as the director of the Center for Radical Transformation (CRT) at Chiba Institute of Technology, Japan.