While Steve Jobs was giving a conference in 1989 at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, he met a 25-year-old woman named Laurene (now 61) who was studying for a Master of Business Administration at the educational institution. The connection between them was so strong that the entrepreneur skipped a business meeting because he wanted to invite her to lunch.
This is how the Apple co-founder experienced and recounted it in Steve Jobs in his biography The Man Who Thought Different: "I was in the parking lot with the car key in the ignition and I thought, 'If this is my last night on earth, would I prefer to spend it in a business meeting or with this woman?'". Things were going so well between them that they finally got married in March 1991 in a Buddhist ceremony with a vegan cake in Yosemite National Park. A few months later, their son Reed was born (33), followed by the two girls, Erin (30) and Eve (26).
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The youngest of the family is getting married this summer to British Olympic rider Henry Charles, whom Eve met at one of the circuits, as Eve, besides being a model, is an equestrian, a discipline in which she became the fifth best in the world among under 25-year-olds in 2019. The wedding will take place in the English countryside, specifically in Oxfordshire, and will be attended by important figures such as Kamala Harris, Athina Onassis, or Jennifer Gates, daughter of Microsoft founder Bill Gates and consequently, the main rival of Apple.
Laurene is fully involved in wedding preparations, but she does not neglect her business ambitions. With the death of Steve Jobs in 2011 at the age of 56 due to respiratory arrest caused by pancreatic cancer metastasis, Laurene inherited 5.5 million shares of Apple and a 7.3% stake in Walt Disney Company, resulting in the astronomical figure of 13.1 billion euros, making her the fourth richest woman in the world. During his lifetime, Jobs had become the largest individual shareholder of Disney after selling Pixar to the conglomerate, the animation studio he founded in 1986. Since then, she has been known as "the queen of Silicon Valley."
Reed Jobs, son of the magnate, with his mother, Laurene Powell.GTRES
Far from being the typical wealthy woman who is dedicated to organizing charitable social events, which she also does, Laurene has long been a shrewd businesswoman who has made very successful investments in the technology sector. The businesswoman has joined forces withJony Ive, who for two decades was Jobs' right-hand man and the design chief at Apple who launched the best products, including the iMac in 1988, the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, and the iPad in 2010, revolutionizing the market once again.
In 2019, Jony decided to leave the company because Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, began to shift the company's direction and give less importance to design. Therefore, with Laurene's financial support, he founded the LoveFrom studio, which in 2024 launched the Io device startup, sold the following year for 6.5 billion dollars to OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence research and deployment company founded by Sam Altman. This significantly increased Ive and Jobs' fortune.
Recently, both have spoken to Financial Times to reveal their upcoming future plans. These two brilliant minds are focused on eliminating the smartphone forever to create a series of mobile devices that operate with a new generation of AI assistants without screens. An unprecedented revolution. "AI will transform the way we work, relate, and communicate," but "it is not clear where the world is heading," they commented to the economic media. This has put Apple, and especially Tim Cook, in a difficult position. Laurene assured Financial Times that her relationship with the company's top authority is very close.
Laurene Jobs is a self-made woman. She worked in the financial sector for Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs and after becoming a widow, she has dedicated herself to financing various projects and creating non-profit organizations. This is the case with the XQ Institute, with which she aims to transform secondary education in the United States, and of course, the Emerson Collective, founded in 2004, a foundation and business holding that houses, among others, Wikimedia Foundation, Beat Industries, or Matternet, focusing on education, the environment, journalism and communication, immigration reform, and health.
Through the latter, Laurene is a co-owner of Axios, one of the most influential media outlets on the internet, and The Atlantic, the political medium that led to the dismissal of Mike Waltz, Trump's National Security Advisor, due to the Signal case. This is noteworthy given Laurene's democratic nature that, with a stroke of her checkbook, propelled Kamala Harris' rise to try to become the occupant of the White House.
Known for her lavish lifestyle, Laurene Jobs often navigates seas and oceans aboard her luxurious $120 million yacht Venus, measuring 78 meters in length, 11.8 meters in beam, and accommodating 12 passengers and 22 crew members. One of the most recognizable vices of the businesswoman is her affinity for purchasing ostentatious properties in different areas of the country, including a mansion she bought in the Pacific Heights neighborhood in San Francisco for $70 million, which was the most expensive in the city until 2018, and the residence she acquired last year in Malibu for $94 million. In the last decade, she has also acquired another mansion in the Paradise Cove neighborhood (Malibu) for $44 million, two years later bought the neighboring house for another $16.5 million, and invested another $15 million in a ranch in Florida.
She is also an investor in various sports companies such as Monumental Sports & Entertainment, which owns the Washington Wizards, WNBA Washington Mystics, and the Capital One Arena stadium. This business stance is due to Laurene being a sports enthusiast as well as an avid athlete. Her hobbies include beekeeping, gardening, and environmental conservation.