Excessive-profile friendships are all the time considerably of a novelty—particularly after they intersect enterprise and politics. Take the comfy relationship between Laurene Powell Jobs and Vice President Kamala Harris, for instance.
Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs, has been buddies with the Democratic presidential nominee for years. In actual fact, these two highly effective girls are so shut Harris has referred to Powell Jobs as a part of her household.
In 2017, then-vice president Joe Biden swore in Harris as a U.S. senator, and proper after the ceremony they posed for a photograph within the Capitol together with her household. Then she requested Biden to take an image together with her “extended family,” in response to a report from The New York Occasions. Powell Jobs—one of many richest girls on the earth—was fast to leap in.
She inherited Jobs’ stakes in Disney and Apple upon his demise, together with her internet price amounting to $11.5 billion in the present day, in response to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
However Powell Jobs’ declare to fame isn’t simply being the spouse of the late and nice Steve Jobs. She based the Emerson Collective, a philanthropy and funding agency closely targeted on training, immigration reform, environmental points, well being, in addition to media and journalism (the collective is a majority proprietor of The Atlantic and funded Axios).
Laurene Powell Jobs’ connection to Democratic politics
Past enterprise investments, although, Powell Jobs and the Emerson Collective have additionally been closely funding democratic politics for the previous a number of years. Since 2020, Powell Jobs and the Emerson Collective have donated greater than $3.4 million to democratic nominees and different funds, in response to Federal Election Fee filings collected by Fortune.
Powell Jobs is amongst a number of rich girls with connections to Silicon Valley making main donations to democratic candidates. Since 2020, philanthropist Melinda French Gates has made $2.09 million in donations, 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki has donated $1.84 million, and former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg has donated $1.53 million.
Not solely has Powell Jobs persistently donated to democrats, however she’s additionally taken a particular curiosity in her good friend Harris. In 2023, Powell Jobs made three donations to Harris’ marketing campaign amounting to just about $1 million.
“Laurene has a gift for friendship, especially old friends—she is tribally loyal,” David Bradley, who bought The Atlantic journal to the Emerson Collective, advised The New York Occasions. “Kamala Harris falls within that ring of friends.” Different Wall Avenue billionaires and large enterprise leaders have additionally backed Harris and offered piles of funding.
Powell Jobs and Harris have been buddies for twenty years, and she or he’s additionally made different “quiet” donations amounting to hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to a corporation backing Harris, three folks briefed on the items advised The New York Occasions. Powell Jobs additionally allegedly performed a “key role” in serving to usher Biden out of the race, making room for Harris to step up.
However their friendship goes again additional than that. Powell Jobs, who’s one yr Harris’ senior, donated $500 to Harris’ first run for district lawyer of San Francisco in 2003, and the 2 of them attended the March for Girls’s Lives in Washington, D.C. with different feminine Bay Space leaders.
Whereas Powell Jobs dodged NYT opinion author Kara Swisher’s query in 2017 about working for the presidency herself in 2020, she confidently pointed to Harris, who was sitting within the crowd at a tech convention.
“I vote for her,” Powell Jobs stated.
