Laurene Powell Jobs: two red cars on the Oval, the Culture Club, the roach coach — and everything she is a link away from

Who this is

In Jonathan Hare's account. In his first year at Stanford GSB, 1990–91, racing down Palm Drive to park on the Oval before class at the Littlefield Management Center, his regular rival for the last spots was Laurene Powell, a year ahead of him in the class of 1991, who also drove red: a Volkswagen Rabbit cabriolet, or — the detail he adds for her benefit — a Ferrari 308 GTS that was Steve Jobs's car, borrowed. His was a Pontiac Fiero GT, the top of the line, bought with the money from his first professional programming job at Impell. They would tear in, park next to each other, and walk in together talking. He got to know her properly through a group they called the Culture Club — a series package at the symphony — and had dinner with her twice there, on his own account because he was cool, did not obsess over her, and did not talk about Steve Jobs, which she did not want to hear about. What they talked about was Save the World stuff, which is what she was into then and is what she does now. He records her as very into health food, and a vegan. He says plainly why the cars and the symphony are here: so that she remembers him, and so that the page signals he knew her when she was a business-school student and not yet a public figure (S-181). No current relationship is claimed.

The roach coach. After graduation, around the time she married Jobs, she co-founded what Hare calls a gourmet organic roach coach with his good friend and her classmate JJ Mullane: mobile food vans to the business parks of Silicon Valley, selling gourmet organic dishes instead of the usual fast food. The public record agrees, at web grade: the company was Terravera, founded in 1992 with fellow Stanford MBA John Mullane, serving basmati-rice platters and black-bean burritos to office-park workers, and later a natural-foods supplier to some three hundred Northern California retailers before she stepped back to tutor students in East Palo Alto. The only difference between the two accounts is the name of the thing; Hare's is the better description.

The public record, at web grade. Born Laurene Powell in 1963 and raised in West Milford, New Jersey; her father, a Marine pilot, died in a crash when she was three. Penn (BA political science, BS economics, Wharton, 1985); Merrill Lynch Asset Management, then three years at Goldman Sachs as a fixed-income trading strategist; Stanford GSB, MBA 1991. She met Steve Jobs in October 1989 when he gave a 'View from the Top' lecture at the business school and she sat in the front row; they married in March 1991 at Yosemite, a Zen monk presiding, and were married twenty years until his death in October 2011. In 1997 she co-founded College Track, which prepares under-resourced students for college. In 2004 she founded Emerson Collective — named for Ralph Waldo Emerson, a co-founder of The Atlantic — the LLC through which her philanthropy, investing and advocacy run: education, immigration, the environment, media. In 2017 Emerson took the majority stake in The Atlantic, which she chairs; she co-founded and chairs the XQ Institute; she sits on the boards of the Ford Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations, among others. After Jobs's death she became a principal holder of Apple and Disney through the Steven P. Jobs Trust.

Why she is here, and what she is one link from. Hare's stated intention (S-181) is that this page put her one link away from the stories that connect him to the people she almost certainly knows. Through The Atlantic: E. O. Wilson, whose book excerpts the magazine published and whose keynote at the first Aspen Ideas Festival it sponsored in 2006 — the festival where Hare met Wilson on the path with Bill Joy and was connected to Jay Short and the Foundation; and David Brooks, Hare's favorite political commentator, now on the magazine's staff. Through JJ Mullane: Julia Seidelin, whom Hare introduced to him because she wanted to open a raw-foods restaurant. Through Steve Jobs: the BMW Z8 the Sunnyvale dealer sold to Jobs instead of Hare, and Frank Caufield's 'you're like Steve Jobs.' The record's invitation stands as it does on every page: correct anything, add what only she knows.

Where this intersects the work

Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.

The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.

Connected from here

There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.

Where this came from

Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.

What is missing, and how to fix it

This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.

• Her recollection, if any, of the Oval, the Culture Club and the symphony
• Anything she would add or strike — it supersedes this page