Steve Jobs’ widow inherited more than 10 billion, but half of it has disappeared: How has she spent it?

The inheritance, valued at $10 billion in 2011, came mainly from shares in Apple and The Disney Company, although the value of these companies has risen significantly in the last 15 years so their value would be much higher, although the latest estimates place Powell Jobs’ fortune ‘only’ at $12.1 billion.

The reason for this imbalance is the multimillion-dollar investment that Steve Jobs’ widow has made in projects to combat climate change such as the Emerson Collective, of which she is president and founder, an investment firm that focuses on promoting social justice, respect for the environment and education, to which it is estimated that she has donated around US$2 billion to date.

In 2021, the businesswoman also committed to allocating around US$3.5 billion over the next 10 years to the Waverley Street Foundation, a project that seeks to prepare communities against the most negative effects of climate change and make them more self-sustainable with an emphasis on green energy and food security.

Perhaps for some families the ‘waste’ of the father’s inheritance may result in an intra-family dispute, but not in the case of your family.

“I’m not interested in accumulating a fortune to leave as an inheritance, and my children know it,” Laurene told The New York Times in early 2020. “Steve wasn’t interested in that either. If I live long enough, it will all end with me.”

This is perhaps helped by the fact that all three children from this relationship are successful in their own fields away from the media attention that dogged their father, with Reed Paul, Erin Jobs and Eve Jobs pursuing successful careers in medicine, architecture and modeling respectively.

For Laurene Powell Jobs, this philanthropic work is her way of honoring her husband’s work. “It is not right for people to accumulate an enormous amount of wealth equivalent to that of millions and millions of people combined. I inherited my assets from my husband, who did not care about the accumulation of wealth,” she stated in the aforementioned media. “I do this in honor of their work, and I have dedicated my life to doing everything I can to distribute it effectively, in ways that improve the lives of people and communities in sustainable ways.”