The Empire of Laurene Powell Jobs
Steve Jobs' widow is one of the wealthiest women in the world, a top investor in AI, and a major progressive philanthropist. She is a key node between Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party.
Laurene Powell Jobs is the widow of legendary Apple founder Steve Jobs, one of the wealthiest women in the world with a net worth estimated at around $14 billion as of August 2025, and a philanthropist who has financially backed a wide range of influential media properties in the United States, in particular the prestige magazine The Atlantic.1 Like Eric Schmidt, the currently 61-year-old Powell Jobs is also one of the few U.S. elites whose social networks substantially overlap between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. On the West Coast, she maintains close relationships with leading venture capitalists and tech executives, including at Apple, and through her main philanthropy and investment vehicle is an investor in companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, and Stripe.2 On the East Coast, she is one of 43 board members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and is known as a close personal friend, backer, and confidante of former U.S. Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, and reportedly even played a key role in persuading the Democratic Party to replace then-President Joe Biden with Harris as the nominee.3