Who Is Steve Jobs’ Wife? All About the Late Apple CEO’s Widow Laurene Powell Jobs

The late Steve Jobs was 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 iPhone in 2007 and had major shares in Pixar and The Walt Disney Company. Laurene co-founded the Emerson Collective, a philanthropy and investment firm that is a majority owner of The Atlantic and 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 in Steve 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 treated pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer.

Laurene often speaks fondly of her late husband, and in 2020 she told The New 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’s early life was spent in rural West Milford, N.J., a far cry from San Francisco, where she lives now. She recalled school as her “happy place” explaining to The New 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 told Vogue in 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 to Wall 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

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

“He plopped down and had this shaggy hair,” she said. “We started chatting, this easy banter, and he was very adorable. I didn’t actually realize who he was, but when he got up and spoke onstage he was just absolutely magnetic. It was so brilliant and thrilling. I was very compelled by him.”

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 co-founder and president of the Emerson Collective

Just like her late husband, Laurene is incredibly business-savvy and has a plethora of successful ventures under her belt. In 2004, she founded the Emerson 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 on the 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 to Forbes, 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.

Laurene is well aware of her wealth.

“It’s not right for individuals to accumulate a massive amount of wealth that’s equivalent to millions and millions of other people combined … I inherited my wealth from my husband, who didn’t care about the accumulation of wealth,” she told The New York Times. “I am doing this in honor of his work, and I’ve dedicated my life to doing the very best I can to distribute it effectively, in ways that lift up individuals and communities in a sustainable way.”

Laurene married Steve in a national park

Steve and Laurene tied the knot on March 18, 1991, two years after their initial meeting. The couple said “I do” in an intimate ceremony officiated by a Buddhist monk at the Ahwahnee Hotel in California’s Yosemite National Park.

The resort was used to film many of the interior scenes of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1980 cult classic horror film The Shining, adapted from Stephen 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; and Eve 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’s LinkedIn.

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’s authorized biography, Steve Jobs.

The youngest of the kids, Eve, had a successful equestrian career and in March 2022, she announced that she had signed with DNA Model 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 told The New York Times in 2020. “Steve wasn’t interested in that. If I live long enough, it ends with me.”