How does Laurene Powell Jobs spend her US$21.7 billion fortune? The wife of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs backed Joe Biden, owns a sprawling San Francisco home and holidays on a superyacht
Laurene Powell Jobs, the 57-year-old billionaire, is a formidable presence in investing circles with a net worth of US$21.7 billion, according toBloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
Powell Jobs has used the fortune she inherited after the death of her husband, Steve Jobs, to expand her own businesses and philanthropies.
Here’s a look at the life of the businesswoman and philanthropist.
In the broadest sense, we want to use our knowledge and our network and our relationships to try to effect the greatest amount of good
Laurene Powell Jobs was born in West Milford, New Jersey, in 1963.
Her father, a pilot, died in a plane crash when she was three years old. Her mother later remarried.
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, where she double-majored in political science and economics, she worked on Wall Street for Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs.
She enrolled in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in 1989. That’s where she met Steve Jobs, her future husband.
According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, Powell Jobs got dragged along to a campus event by a friend. It turned out to be a guest lecture by Jobs.
“I knew that Steve Jobs was the speaker, but the face I thought of was that of Bill Gates,” Powell Jobs told Isaacson. “I had them mixed up.”
“This was 1989,” Powell Jobs added. “He was working at Next, and he was not that big of a deal to me. I wasn’t that enthused, but my friend was, so we went.”
The pair arrived late and were told they couldn’t just sit in the aisle. Powell Jobs and her friend ended up sneaking into the reserved seats at the front of the hall.
Jobs ended up sitting next to his future wife: “I looked to my right, and there was a beautiful girl there, so we started chatting while I was waiting to be introduced,” he said.
Powell Jobs joked that she was sitting up front because she’d won a raffle and the prize included a dinner with Jobs.
Jobs finished his lecture and chased after his future wife, who had already walked out of the hall. He found Powell Jobs in the car park and asked her about the raffle. She agreed to go to dinner with him that Saturday, and they exchanged numbers.
But apparently the weekend wasn’t soon enough: Jobs prepared to leave for a work dinner but returned to Powell Jobs. Changing his mind, he asked if she’d like to go to dinner that night instead. She agreed, and they headed to a nearby restaurant called Saint Michael’s Alley.
While Jobs’ Next colleagues waited for their boss to show up, the tech founder and Powell Jobs spent four hours at the restaurant and remained together afterwards that night.
They married in March 1991 at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. The couple had three children: Reed, Erin and Eve. Eve Jobs, 23, began modelling for the beauty brand Glossier in late 2020.
When Jobs died from cancer in 2011, his wife inherited his wealth, including stakes in Apple and The Walt Disney Company. The inheritance left Powell Jobs a billionaire.
Her stake in Disney initially made her the company’s largest individual shareholder, but in 2017, she reduced her ownership to 4 per cent.
Powell Jobs spends a lot of her fortune on philanthropy, and Forbes named her the 29th most powerful woman in the world in 2014.
She told The New York Times in 2013 that she isn’t interested in passing her fortune down to her kids. “If I live long enough, it ends with me,” she said. “In the broadest sense, we want to use our knowledge and our network and our relationships to try to effect the greatest amount of good.”
In 1992, she founded a health-food truck called Terravera with fellow Stanford MBA graduate John Mullane.
The pair sold basmati rice platters and burritos with black bean dressing to white-collar workers in office parks. “We just wanted to offer a convenient way for them to eat healthy food,” Powell Jobs told the Chicago Tribune in 1992.
She later backed away from Terravera to focus on her volunteer work tutoring underprivileged students in East Palo Alto.
In 1997, Powell Jobs founded College Track, a non-profit organisation that helps prepare low-income students for college through tutoring and mentoring. College Track now operates centers in three states and the District of Columbia.
Powell Jobs founded Emerson Collective in 2004, a “social change organisation” named after one of her favourite writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The Emerson Collective is a private company rather than a traditional non-profit, and makes grants and investments that focus on immigration, social justice and education. It has funded several start-ups. The Washington Post described it as a “kind of Justice League of practical progressives”.
Emerson Collective projects include AltSchool, a venture-capital-backed school that aimed to transform education by personalising instruction with technology. AltSchool made disappointing revenues and handed over control of its four schools to another start-up in 2019.
In September 2015, Powell Jobs pledged US$50 million via Emerson to fund a campaign called XQ: The Super School Project. That venture aims to transform education by revamping how high schools approach curriculum. Powell Jobs is the chairwoman of XQ’s board of directors.
Powell Jobs has also served on the board of several other organizations, including Teach for America, Conservation International and the New America Foundation.
She’s a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Stanford University’s board of trustees. Along with Michael Bloomberg and Ray Dalio, Powell Jobs is a founding member of the Climate Leadership Council.
In addition to her work with various causes, Powell Jobs has a reputation as a major art collector and enthusiast. She attended the “Manus X Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology” Met Gala in 2016 alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook.
She’s also a big sports fan. She bought a 20 per cent stake in the company that owns the NBA’s Washington Wizards, the NHL’s Washington Capitals, and Washington’s Capital One Arena in October 2018.
In July 2017, Emerson Collective acquired a majority stake in The Atlantic, which was forced to lay off 17 per cent of its staff during the pandemic.
Powell Jobs commended the magazine for its drive to “bring about equality for all people; to illuminate and defend the American idea; to celebrate American culture and literature; and to cover our marvellous, messy, democratic experiment”.
Former president Donald Trump lashed out at Powell Jobs in the fall of 2020 over a report from The Atlantic that alleged he called WWI soldiers “WWlosers”. He tweeted, “Steve Jobs would not be happy that his wife is wasting money he left her on a flailing radical left magazine.”
Powell Jobs has also put millions of dollars into political campaigns. She backed Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign before the California senator withdrew from the race in December 2019.
Powell Jobs backed secretary Hillary Clinton in 2016, donating US$2 million to Clinton’s Super PAC through Emerson Collective and hosting US$200,000-a-plate fundraiser that raised over US$4 million, CNN reported.
She also donated more than US$600,000 to efforts to elect President Joe Biden.
Powell Jobs is most passionate about education and immigration policy. She met with former president Trump to discuss the topics in March 2017.
When it comes to property, Powell Jobs owns a US$16.5 million home in San Francisco that boasts six bedrooms, six and a half bathrooms and incredible views of the city.
Powell Jobs owns three other homes in the Bay Area, including a 5,770 sq ft house she shared with her late husband.
She puts on elaborate Halloween shows in front of that house each year that attract as many as 3,000 people. In 2019, the event was called Fog Town and featured a jack-o’-lantern tower and professional lighting, actors and special effects.
When she and her family are looking to get away, they sail off on the Venus. The yacht cost at least US$110 million to build and was commissioned by Jobs but completed after he died. It has been spotted in Göcek, Turkey; Milos, Greece; and Brijuni, Croatia.
Despite her luxurious lifestyle and widespread influence, Powell Jobs tries to keep a low profile.
“I’m very aware of the fact that we’re all just passing through here,” Powell Jobs told The Washington Post in 2018. “I feel like I’m hitting my stride now. It is my goal to effectively deploy resources. If there’s nothing left when I die, that’s just fine.”
Powell Jobs recently delivered a commencement speech to the University of Pennsylvania’s graduating class of 2021 and advised the students to follow her late husband’s advice to find work in what they love to do.
“Let his words guide you, as they’ve guided me,” Powell Jobs said in the speech in May, according to CNBC.
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This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
