What Does Billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs Want?
She’s inventing a new brand of philanthropic power. What is her vision and where is it taking us?
By David Montgomery
Laurene Powell Jobs — like the inventors and disrupters who were all around her — was thinking big. It was 2004, and she was an East Coast transplant — sprung from a cage in West Milford, NewJersey, as her musical idol Bruce Springsteen might put it — acclimating to the audacious sense of possibility suffusing the laboratories, garages and office parks of Silicon Valley. She could often be found at a desk in a rented office in Palo Alto, California, working a phone and an Apple computer. There, her own creation was beginning to take shape. It would involve philanthropy . . . technology . . . social change — she was charting the destination as she made the journey.
She eventually named the project Emerson Collective after Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of her favorite writers. In time it would become perhaps the most influential product of Silicon Valley that you’ve never heard of. Yet at first, growth was slow. The work took a back seat to raising her three children and managing the care of her husband, Steve Jobs, as he battled the cancer that killed him in 2011 at age 56, followed by a period of working through family grief.
