Who Is Steve Jobs' Wife? All About Entrepreneur Laurene Powell Jobs

Mar. 15, 2025

Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell arrive at the 82nd Annual Academy Awards held at Kodak Theatre on March 7, 2010 in Hollywood, California.Photo: Alexandra Wyman/Getty

The lateSteve Jobswas married to his wife,Laurene Powell Jobs, for 20 years.

The Jobses were certainly a power couple. As one of the most famous tech founders, Steve started Apple in 1976,introduced the iPhonein 2007 and had major shares in Pixar and The Walt Disney Company. Laurene founded the Emerson Collective, a philanthropy and investment firm that is a majority owner ofThe Atlanticand has funded media companies like Gimlet, Ozy and Axios.

Steve met his future wife while he was giving a lecture at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Laurene was a 25-year-old M.B.A. student at the time and she and the Apple mogul hit it off. Steve even skipped a business meeting to take her on a date, and the rest is history.

“I was in the parking lot, with the key in the car, and I thought to myself, ‘If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting, or with this woman?’ " Steve said inSteve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different: A Biography. “I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she’d have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town and we’ve been together ever since.”

The couple wed two years later and were inseparable until Steve died in 2011 following a relapse of his previously treatedpancreatic neuroendocrinecancer.

Laurene often speaks fondly of her late husband, and in 2020 she toldTheNew York Times: “I grew up with him. Just like anyone that you share your life with, there’s an exchange and a robustness. We had a very, very beautiful and rich connection.”

So, who is Steve Jobs' wife? Here’s everything to know about Laurene Powell Jobs and her relationship with the late Apple co-founder.

She grew up in New Jersey

Laurene Powell Jobs attends The New York Times 2014 Schools For Tomorrow conference reception at TheTimesCenter on September 8, 2014 in New York City.Neilson Barnard/Getty

Laurene’s early life was spent in rural West Milford, N.J. She recalled school as her “happy place” explaining toTheNew York Times,“I ended up going to a good college, even though my high school wasn’t particularly outstanding.”

When Laurene was 3 years old, her father, a military pilot, died in a plane collision.

“The other pilot was able to eject, and he was not,” she toldVoguein 2016 of her father’s death. “I remember being in school and thinking that people don’t know this thing about me — that there was a loss inside.”

“It’s hard when people die, but there’s something about when people die suddenly,” she continued. “I remember thinking that you have to take advantage of things. I felt very lucky knowing that.”

Her mother, a teacher, remarried a fellow teacher, with whom Laurene was not close.

Laurene started her career working on Wall Street

According toWall Street Journal, Laurene began her career working on Wall Street after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania. She worked for Merrill Lynch in asset management before moving to Goldman Sachs, where she was one of the few women at the company.

Laurene soon realized that she wanted to venture into entrepreneurship and applied to Stanford’s graduate program.

“I wanted to come here because this was the place where new things were happening,” she recalled of her cross-country move.

She didn’t realize who Steve was when they first met

Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell during Pixar Exhibit Launch at The Museum of Modern Art at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, New York, United States.Brian Ach/WireImage

Laurene recalled her meet-cute with her future husband toWSJ, admitting that she didn’t know who Steve was at first.

After the talk ended, he found her in the parking lot. Both of them ditched their other plans and had dinner together. “We talked and talked and talked. We were together henceforth,” Laurene recalled.

“It was exciting — and he lived in a whole other domain that I didn’t know anything about. So it was endlessly interesting,” she added.

Laurene is the founder and president of the Emerson Collective

Laurene Powell Jobs speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017 at Pier 48 on September 20, 2017 in San Francisco, California.Steve Jennings/Getty

Just like her late husband, Laurene is incredibly business-savvy and has a plethora of successful ventures under her belt. In 2004, she founded theEmerson Collective, a company that invests in education, the environment and immigration reform. The organization is named for writer Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“It’s very difficult to make sustainable and sustained change. None of the issues we are trying to address have easy solutions and making progress requires a variety of approaches,” she wrote onthe company’s website. “We work with domain experts with a breadth of experiences, insights and relationships, and we use a range of tools, like philanthropy, investing, convening and storytelling to build broad coalitions.”

She’s a multibillionaire

According toForbes, Laurene is worth over $10 billion dollars. In addition to running her own businesses, she inherited her late husband’s trust, which included shares in Apple and The Walt Disney Company. Laurene is also a minority shareholder in Monumental Sports, the parent company of the NBA’s Wizards, the NHL’s Capitals and the WNBA’s Mystics.

Despite her net worth, Laurene has often spoken about how her husband “didn’t care about the accumulation of wealth,” and how she is committed to distributing what she inherited “in ways that lift up individuals and communities in a sustainable way,” as she explained toThe New York Times.

Laurene is a dedicated philanthropist, particularly when it comes to fighting climate change. In 2021, she pledged to donate $3.5 billion through the Waverley Street Foundation, a nonprofit she founded to promote “environmental and climate resiliency, mitigation, and adaptation,“per TIME.

Laurene married Steve in a national park

Steve Jobs and his wife Laurene Powell Jobs aat President Jiang Zemin of China State Dinner, White House, Washington DC, USA - 29 Oct 1997.REX/Shutterstock

The resort was used to film many of the interior scenes ofStanley Kubrick’s 1980 cult classic horror filmThe Shining, adapted fromStephen King’s novel of the same name.

Laurene and Steve shared three kids

Steve and Laurene welcomed three children together: Reed Jobs, born Sept. 22, 1991;Erin Siena Jobs, born Aug. 19, 1995; andEve Jobs, born July 19, 1998. Steve also had a daughter, Lisa, from a previous relationship.

Reed worked as the managing director of Emerson Collective, with a focus on the healthcare space, from 2015 to 2023. Then, he moved to found his venture capital firm, Yosemite, which aims to “make cancer non-lethal within our lifetime,” per Reed’sLinkedIn.

Erin, the most private of the Jobs kids, is “quiet” and “introspective” and has “a personal sensitivity more mature than her father’s,” according to Steve’sauthorized biography,Steve Jobs.

The youngest of the kids, Eve, had a successful equestrian career and in March 2022, she announced that she hadsigned with DNAModel Management.

Laurene has said that she will distribute her fortune “effectively, in ways that lift up individuals and communities in a sustainable way,” and has no desire to pass her wealth onto her kids. “I’m not interested in legacy wealth buildings, and my children know that,” she toldTheNew York Timesin 2020. “Steve wasn’t interested in that. If I live long enough, it ends with me.”

source: people.com