After then Vice President Joe Biden swore in Kamala Harris as a United States senator in January 2017, they posed for a customary photo in the Capitol with her family. Then she asked her future boss for a favor: Would he indulge in one more photo?
“Come on, everybody,” Harris said, waving in a dozen others. “My extended family is here.”
The first member of Harris’s entourage to approach Biden just happened to be one of the richest people in the world: Laurene Powell Jobs.
Powell Jobs, the philanthropist who controls a fortune worth over $11 billion, stood just behind Biden’s right shoulder, joining Harris’s best friend from kindergarten and others in her inner circle. As the photo was snapped and the group broke up, Biden grabbed a coveted 60 seconds with Powell Jobs — asking about her son and talking about his ambitions for cancer research.
Few figures have cultivated a more consequential friendship with Harris, now the Democratic nominee for president, than Powell Jobs, who for decades was married to one of America’s most famous entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs.
Over the past 20 years, she has become one of Harris’s most essential confidantes, providing counsel and money, and helping to expand Harris’s public profile. Now, in this year’s presidential race, the wealthiest woman in Silicon Valley has emerged as a powerful player behind the scenes. She has quietly contributed millions of dollars to an organization backing Harris, according to three people briefed on the gifts.
She played a hidden but key role in helping usher Biden out of the race, which cleared the way for a Harris run.
And Powell Jobs, who is so close to the vice president that her staff refers to her simply as “L.P.J.,” is positioned to have extraordinary influence, or at least access, in a potential Harris administration.
“Laurene has a gift for friendship, especially old friends — she is tribally loyal,” said David Bradley, who sold The Atlantic magazine to Powell Jobs’s company, the Emerson Collective. “Kamala Harris falls within that ring of friends.”
Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, found himself at an intimate dinner in Washington last fall, along with Powell Jobs, Harris and Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband.
The women, he recalled, seemed especially at ease. “It was the vice president’s residence,” he said, “but they were sitting on the sofa like longtime girlfriends.”
Over fish and African vegetables, Walker said, they chatted about art and recounted stories of their recent travels to Africa.
“There was no mention of any political leaders,” he said. “No one mentioned Trump. No one mentioned the president.”
Politicians often use the word “friend’ to describe patrons who can power their campaigns and careers. Neither Harris nor Powell Jobs, who both zealously guard their privacy, would comment for this story. But in interviews, three dozen people with insight into their bond described a genuine friendship built on a shared political philosophy, an interest in art and culture and their mutual trials as women in the public spotlight.
Harris, 59, and Powell Jobs, 60, rose to prominence together in the Bay Area: Powell Jobs donated $500 to Harris’s first run for district attorney of San Francisco in 2003. The next year, they attended the March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C., part of a “posse” of female leaders from the Bay Area, recalled Andrea Dew Steele, who organized the group.
“She was helpful early on in Kamala’s career,” Dew Steele recalled.
The women spent the next two decades traveling among the same Silicon Valley elite. They have attended each other’s family events: Powell Jobs was one of about 60 people to attend Harris’s wedding to Emhoff in 2014, and Powell Jobs invited Harris to the wedding of her son, Reed, this year in Hawaii, which Emhoff attended. They even shared the same celebrity dermatologist.
Even as Harris’s career took her to Sacramento and Washington, they have gone on personal trips together, with Harris at times flying on Powell Jobs’s private plane. They have prioritized one-on-one meals when they’ve found themselves in the same city: They have been spotted together at Quince, the San Francisco hot spot, and were once seen chatting with Rupert Murdoch at the high-end restaurant Nobu Malibu.
Susie Tompkins Buell, a San Francisco philanthropist who is close to both women, recalled the look on Powell Jobs’s face as Harris spoke at her swearing-in as attorney general in 2011.
“I’ve watched them appreciate each other in a room full of a lot of people — Laurene looking so proudly at Kamala when she was speaking, and just seeing this great sense of appreciation and pride,” she said. She has texted with Powell Jobs in recent weeks about how to support Harris’s presidential bid. “I know she’s just beside herself with joy.”
In 2017, Powell Jobs consented to a rare interview onstage at a tech conference hosted by the journalist Kara Swisher, who would become a New York Times opinion writer. She brought Harris along and made the interview a twofer.
It was the beginning of the Trump administration, but Swisher was already looking ahead to the next election. When she jokingly asked Powell Jobs if she was planning to run for president in 2020, Powell Jobs quickly turned the question into an opportunity to promote Harris, then a newly elected senator from California.
“Well, one of us should,” Powell Jobs replied. She pointed at Harris and said, “I vote for her.”
Powell Jobs’s re-emergence into public and political life in the years since her husband died of cancer, in 2011, has been cautious and deliberate. She began making bigger political donations and lobbying Washington, pressing President Barack Obama on education at a closed-door Q. and A. with other tech billionaires during his 2012 re-election campaign, according to a person who was in the room.
Powell Jobs was, like her late husband, an enigma — but she had sweeping ambitions. Politicians began to seek her out.
Michelle Obama invited her to sit in her box during Obama’s State of the Union address in 2012. Hillary Clinton cultivated her, and Powell Jobs hosted a 20-person, $200,000-a-head event for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. She struck up a friendship with Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican speaker of the House.
And as Harris sought higher office, Powell Jobs hosted a series of fund-raisers for her, including several at her house and one in 2014 with fellow Silicon Valley royalty like Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce; the investor Ron Conway, her closest political confidant; and Sean Parker, the early Facebook executive. In 2016, she spent election night taking selfies with Harris at a party in Los Angeles, celebrating Harris’s election to the Senate.
As a senator, Harris often visited Emerson Collective’s offices in Washington to speak with Powell Jobs, her staff and the billionaire’s friends like Yo-Yo Ma and the fashion designer Marc Ecko.
Still, the sprawl of Powell Jobs’s empire, vast even among ambitious Silicon Valley billionaires, sometimes gets in the way. Powell Jobs’s 2017 near-total purchase of The Atlantic has at times made her reluctant to jump more fully into politics. She has told other Democrats that as the de facto owner of a large media company — Powell Jobs has even tried her hand at journalism, interviewing Harris for an event hosted by The Atlantic — she should not be a full-fledged partisan actor, to the frustration of some on both her and Harris’s teams. She declined to significantly help Harris’s presidential bid in 2019.
The fateful debate
Powell Jobs has visited the Biden-Harris White House nine times, but she has not always loved the administration.
The first years of Harris’s tenure as vice president were especially difficult, as she drew criticism for her efforts on illegal immigration and reports of unhappiness among her staff. She frequently leaned on Powell Jobs, confiding in her about the toll that the public scrutiny was taking, according to a person briefed on the relationship, and Powell Jobs pushed other Democrats to defend her more vigorously.
But Powell Jobs’s relationship with Biden has been trickier. She has been a major shareholder in Apple and Disney, and has bristled at some Biden policy positions that she considers anti-tech. She expressed frustration over what she considered hostile rhetoric from the president about rich people and Silicon Valley.
Then came the June debate.
After Biden’s disastrous performance against former President Donald J. Trump, Powell Jobs expressed to other major Democratic donors her deep concerns about Biden’s ability to win the election. One of her top aides, David Simas, a former Obama staff member who oversees her political research, circulated focus-group and polling data to other donors that painted a dire portrait. Several said that Simas’s research was influential in encouraging them to mobilize against Biden.
As Biden insisted that he would not leave the race, Harris quietly tried to survey her options and navigate the sensitive politics of the moment. Among those she turned to for counsel was Powell Jobs.
Just weeks later, Jobs was at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, sitting at times in Harris’s exclusive friends and family box and watching her companion formally accept the party’s nomination for president.
A Harris administration role?
Harris and Powell Jobs have talked for decades about the challenges of being women in the public eye — and now the billionaire could help elect the country’s first female president.
Powell Jobs was not particularly involved in Biden’s re-election campaign, but she has told friends recently that she was energized by Harris’s ascension. She has joined calls with Harris campaign officials in recent weeks and told them that she was eager to host an intimate, pricey event for her, similar to the one she threw for Hillary Clinton, although with time short and money flooding in, officials are skeptical that an event will come together.
Powell Jobs has spoken with other female leaders in technology and encouraged them to publicly support Harris. And her team has circulated to other megadonors a list of 17 recommended pro-Harris organizations to which they can donate, including the super PAC Future Forward, where one of her senior political aides is working. Powell Jobs prefers to make undisclosed contributions, and she has donated millions to Future Forward’s dark-money vehicle, according to three people briefed on the donations.
Friends of Powell Jobs have long thought she might want to go into politics. Some have wondered whether, if Harris wins the election, Powell Jobs might want a formal role in the administration, such as secretary of education, one of her top issues. Others hope she will simply use her clout to try to influence Harris more informally, such as by pushing her to support tougher measures to fight climate change.
Either way, Marc Porter Magee, an education-reform advocate, predicted that Powell Jobs would emerge as an insider in a Harris administration.
“Laurene is one of a small number of philanthropists who has both made significant investments in educational innovation and is also actively engaged in Democratic politics,” he said. “If Harris wins, she and her staff could emerge as important players in an administration that has yet to define its K-12 agenda.”
Is the publicity-averse Powell Jobs even interested in a Washington career?
“I do live a life of service now, and I feel like I am getting good at it,” Powell Jobs told an interviewer in 2022. “It’s not my intention,” she said, “but I would not necessarily shy away from another opportunity.”
Theodore Schleifer is a reporter with The New York Times. Copyright 2024, The New York Times.
What I like about Republicans now after being de-brainwashed during COVID? Sure, they hang out with billionaires, too. The difference is they are far more open about their true beliefs, plans and opinions. While Dems lead by a lot this election cycle in taking dark money – and paid off media outlets to provide favorable coverage.
This is why working class people everywhere are leaning toward Trump – and your typical, entitled political libs are voting on emotion and fringe issues like abortion, that impact less than 0.3% of people. That’s how privileged and entitled the coastal elites are – they pay big money to buffer themselves from progressive policy failures (hi Los Gatos, Saratoga, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, etc) – then vote to funnel illegal camps and supportive housing to lower income areas while they preserve their privilege. This has nothing to do with race and everything to do with class.
CA has the highest real poverty rate, most homeless (many mentally ill/addicts) & large deficits. Wake up.
So this woman was part of the coup?
Kamala got zero votes in the primary but she secured the nomination because of billionaires operating in the shadows like this woman who married into money. While the media cheers and writes puff pieces like this one.
Talk about a threat to democracy.
Don’t forget the problem going back to the radicalization of the Left in the later 1960s that now has “progressed” to routine hatred and intolerance (as seen on college campuses and in a number of other places now) for the white working class or more broadly, for more conventional white persons who work for a living, reject lunacy, and resent, may resist being exploited. (Including these days from driving to and from work, or on errands) That extends to others who also work for a living and also reject, resent, may resist at times, don’t like getting ahead to be taxed more, to pay for what?
Laurene Powell Jobs?
Ask Harris in a later interview, if there is one, when discussing housing, about California Forever.
As for here, now: May an interviewer discussing housing with Harris ask about California Forever.
“Like the woman who married into money”. That’s funny, considering Trump was born into money and the highest privilege and has repeatedly proven he’ll cut any deal he can to make himself richer, failing repeatedly by the way. And fraudulently set up a charity to only benefit himself, while Jobs truly philanthropically gives to help others. And Trump also takes “dark” money. But you want to condemn her for supporting her candidate, like every billionaire does on both sides. Hypocrisy is so thick.
Not only did Trump inherent wealth (a bit different than marrying into it btw, cause you get some of the winner genes with that, marrying is more like dysgenics), he is a lifetime NYC Democrat, friend of Oprah, friend of Bill, friend of Hillary, friend of Jesse JAckson, and friend of Al Sharpton. Trump is a Keynesian and nanny-stater by heart, which was clear in the CARES Act, moonshot, and eviction moratorium. He is also up front and honest about corrupt the entire “democratic” process is and how the oligarchy can buy up elections. Which is why he went GOP, because their party machine was weaker than the DNC-dominated one, which has been very evident in the Obama, Hillary, Biden, Harris third-way era of the Democratic Party.
I am disheartened to read this. I am not sophisticated in the politics of the very wealthy that support their favorite politicians. I actually believed that Kamela Harris really means to help US….people like me who have been picking up the slack for these very wealthy and fortunate people who are NOT paying their share of taxes, and pass it on diwn to people like me, who can’t afford it! They just use their money like a Monopoly Mogul! What about the California Forever Prohect that Sued people to sell their properties, in 2017 that is next to and around Travis Air Force Base?! Does this Widow of Steve Jobs know where her money is going? Or how she could hurt Kamela Harris?? Who is rhe widow of Steve Jobs trying to help??
Alan —
Unlike Kamala, Trump received support from voters in the primaries, indeed overwhelming support. He didn’t need a coup by the widow of a Silicon Valley plutocrat to win his party’s nomination.
Kamala got zero primary votes. Zero.
She is the installed candidate. As part of a coup against the sitting President, who did receive sufficient primary votes to secure his party’s nomination. You know, the guy who is still nominally running the country but in actuality isn’t.