Laurene Powell Jobs is an American billionaire, philanthropist, and the widow of Steve Jobs, the Co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Apple. She is the Founder and Executive of Emerson Collective, an organization that advocates for policies in support of education and immigration reform, environmental conservation, and social justice.
Powell Jobs earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences, a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a Master of Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She met her future husband at Stanford after sneaking into a lecture and striking up a conversation with him.
Powell Jobs began her career at Merrill Lynch Asset Management. She also spent three years at Goldman Sachs as a Fixed-Income Trading Strategist. In 1992, she co-founded Terravera, a natural foods company that sold to retailers throughout Northern California. She later stepped away from Terravera to focus on her volunteer work tutoring underprivileged students.
Powell Jobs served on the Board of Directors of Achieva, which created online tools to help students study more effectively for standardized tests. In 1997, she co-founded College Track, a non-profit organization that helps to prepare low-income students for college through tutoring and mentoring. She also serves on the Advisory Board at Udacity, a company that offers open online courses.
After the death of her husband, Powell Jobs inherited the Steven P. Jobs Trust and received billions of dollars in stock in Apple and Disney. As of July 2020, Forbes ranked her and her family 59th on the annual list of the world's wealthiest billionaires and 30th on the Forbes 400. She is the wealthiest woman in the technology industry according to the same list.
Powell Jobs is also a sports fanatic and owns about 20% of Monumental Sports and Entertainment, which owns the Washington Wizards, the Washington Capitals, the Washington Mystics, and the Capital One Arena. These holdings make Powell Jobs a rarity in the often male-dominated world of sports-franchise ownership.