Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
FAMILY MAN
At Home with the Jobs Clan
With Laurene Powell, 1991
Laurene Powell
By this point, based on his dating history, a matchmaker could have put together a composite 
sketch of the woman who would be right for Jobs. Smart, yet unpretentious. Tough enough to 
stand up to him, yet Zen-like enough to rise above turmoil. Well-educated and independent, yet 
ready to make accommodations for him and a family. Down-to-earth, but with a touch of the 
ethereal. Savvy enough to know how to manage him, but secure enough to not always need to. 
And it wouldn’t hurt to be a beautiful, lanky blonde with an easygoing sense of humor who liked 
organic vegetarian food. In October 1989, after his split with Tina Redse, just such a woman 
walked into his life.
More specifically, just such a woman walked into his classroom. Jobs had agreed to give one of 
the “View from the Top” lectures at the Stanford Business School one Thursday evening. Laurene 
Powell was a new graduate student at the business school, and a guy in her class talked her into 
going to the lecture. They arrived late and all the seats were taken, so they sat in the aisle. When 
an usher told them they had to move, Powell took her friend down to the front row and 
commandeered two of the reserved seats there. Jobs was led to the one next to her when he 
arrived. “I looked to my right, and there was a beautiful girl there, so we started chatting while I 
was waiting to be introduced,” Jobs recalled. They bantered a bit, and Laurene joked that she was 
sitting there because she had won a raffle, and the prize was that he got to take her to dinner. “He 
was so adorable,” she later said.
After the speech Jobs hung around on the edge of the stage chatting with students. He watched 
Powell leave, then come back and stand at the edge of the crowd, then leave again. He bolted out 
after her, brushing past the dean, who was trying to grab him for a conversation. After catching up 
with her in the parking lot, he said, “Excuse me, wasn’t there something about a raffle you won, 
that I’m supposed to take you to dinner?” She laughed. “How about Saturday?” he asked. She 
agreed and wrote down her number. Jobs headed to his car to drive up to the Thomas Fogarty 
winery in the Santa Cruz mountains above Woodside, where the NeXT education sales group was 

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holding a dinner. But he suddenly stopped and turned around. “I thought, wow, I’d rather have 
dinner with her than the education group, so I ran back to her car and said ‘How about dinner 
tonight
?’” She said yes. It was a beautiful fall evening, and they walked into Palo Alto to a funky 
vegetarian restaurant, St. Michael’s Alley, and ended up staying there for four hours. “We’ve been 
together ever since,” he said.
Avie Tevanian was sitting at the winery restaurant waiting with the rest of the NeXT education 
group. “Steve was sometimes unreliable, but when I talked to him I realized that something 
special had come up,” he said. As soon as Powell got home, after midnight, she 
called her close friend Kathryn (Kat) Smith, who was at Berkeley, and left a message on her 
machine. “You will not believe what just happened to me!” it said. “You will not believe who I 
met!” Smith called back the next morning and heard the tale. “We had known about Steve, and he 
was a person of interest to us, because we were business students,” she recalled.
Andy Hertzfeld and a few others later speculated that Powell had been scheming to meet Jobs. 
“Laurene is nice, but she can be calculating, and I think she targeted him from the beginning,” 
Hertzfeld said. “Her college roommate told me that Laurene had magazine covers of Steve and 
vowed she was going to meet him. If it’s true that Steve was manipulated, there is a fair amount of 
irony there.” But Powell later insisted that this wasn’t the case. She went only because her friend 
wanted to go, and she was slightly confused as to who they were going to see. “I knew that Steve 
Jobs was the speaker, but the face I thought of was that of Bill Gates,” she recalled. “I had them 
mixed up. This was 1989. He was working at NeXT, and he was not that big of a deal to me. I 
wasn’t that enthused, but my friend was, so we went.”
“There were only two women in my life that I was truly in love with, Tina and Laurene,” Jobs 
later said. “I thought I was in love with Joan Baez, but I really just liked her a lot. It was just Tina 
and then Laurene.”
Laurene Powell had been born in New Jersey in 1963 and learned to be self-sufficient at an early 
age. Her father was a Marine Corps pilot who died a hero in a crash in Santa Ana, California; he 
had been leading a crippled plane in for a landing, and when it hit his plane he kept flying to avoid 
a residential area rather than ejecting in time to save his life. Her mother’s second marriage turned 
out to be a horrible situation, but she felt she couldn’t leave because she had no means to support 
her large family. For ten years Laurene and her three brothers had to suffer in a tense household, 
keeping a good demeanor while compartmentalizing problems. She did well. “The lesson I learned 
was clear, that I always wanted to be self-sufficient,” she said. “I took pride in that. My 
relationship with money is that it’s a tool to be self-sufficient, but it’s not something that is part of 
who I am.”
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she worked at Goldman Sachs as a fixed 
income trading strategist, dealing with enormous sums of money that she traded for the house 
account. Jon Corzine, her boss, tried to get her to stay at Goldman, but instead she decided the 
work was unedifying. “You could be really successful,” she said, “but you’re just contributing to 
capital formation.” So after three years she quit and went to Florence, Italy, living there for eight 
months before enrolling in Stanford Business School.
After their Thursday night dinner, she invited Jobs over to her Palo Alto apartment on Saturday. 
Kat Smith drove down from Berkeley and pretended to be her roommate so she could meet him as 
well. Their relationship became very passionate. “They would kiss and make out,” Smith said. 
“He was enraptured with her. He would call me on the phone and ask, ‘What do you think, does 
she like me?’ Here I am in this bizarre position of having this iconic person call me.”
That New Year’s Eve of 1989 the three went to Chez Panisse, the famed Alice Waters 
restaurant in Berkeley, along with Lisa, then eleven. Something happened at the dinner that caused 
Jobs and Powell to start arguing. They left separately, and Powell ended up spending the night at 
Kat Smith’s apartment. At nine the next morning there was a knock at the door, and Smith opened 
it to find Jobs, standing in the drizzle holding some wildflowers he had picked. “May I come in 
and see Laurene?” he said. She was still asleep, and he walked into the bedroom. A couple of 
hours went by, while Smith waited in the living room, unable to go in and get her clothes. Finally, 
she put a coat on over her nightgown and went to Peet’s Coffee to pick up some food. Jobs did not 
emerge until after noon. “Kat, can you come here for a minute?” he asked. They all gathered in the 

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bedroom. “As you know, Laurene’s father passed away, and Laurene’s mother isn’t here, and 
since you’re her best friend, I’m going to ask you the question,” he said. “I’d like to marry 
Laurene. Will you give your blessing?”
Smith clambered onto the bed and thought about it. “Is this okay with you?” she asked Powell. 
When she nodded yes, Smith announced, “Well, there’s your answer.”
It was not, however, a definitive answer. Jobs had a way of focusing on something with insane 
intensity for a while and then, abruptly, 
turning away his gaze. At work, he would focus on what he wanted to, when he wanted to, and 
on other matters he would be unresponsive, no matter how hard people tried to get him to engage. 
In his personal life, he was the same way. At times he and Powell would indulge in public displays 
of affection that were so intense they embarrassed everyone in their presence, including Kat Smith 
and Powell’s mother. In the mornings at his Woodside mansion, he would wake Powell up by 
blasting the Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy” on his tape deck. Yet at other times he 
would ignore her. “Steve would fluctuate between intense focus, where she was the center of the 
universe, to being coldly distant and focused on work,” said Smith. “He had the power to focus 
like a laser beam, and when it came across you, you basked in the light of his attention. When it 
moved to another point of focus, it was very, very dark for you. It was very confusing to Laurene.”
Once she had accepted his marriage proposal on the first day of 1990, he didn’t mention it 
again for several months. Finally, Smith confronted him while they were sitting on the edge of a 
sandbox in Palo Alto. What was going on? Jobs replied that he needed to feel sure that Powell 
could handle the life he lived and the type of person he was. In September she became fed up with 
waiting and moved out. The following month, he gave her a diamond engagement ring, and she 
moved back in.
In December Jobs took Powell to his favorite vacation spot, Kona Village in Hawaii. He had 
started going there nine years earlier when, stressed out at Apple, he had asked his assistant to 
pick out a place for him to escape. At first glance, he didn’t like the cluster of sparse thatched-roof 
bungalows nestled on a beach on the big island of Hawaii. It was a family resort, with communal 
eating. But within hours he had begun to view it as paradise. There was a simplicity and spare 
beauty that moved him, and he returned whenever he could. He especially enjoyed being there that 
December with Powell. Their love had matured. The night before Christmas he again declared, 
even more formally, that he wanted to marry her. Soon another factor would drive that decision. 
While in Hawaii, Powell got pregnant. “We know exactly where it happened,” Jobs later said with 
a laugh.