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Laurene Powell Jobs

President, Emerson Collective

The patron of a new left-center intellectualism

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The richest woman in Silicon Valley is now also the most powerful woman in journalism. Billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, who for more than a decade has worked in relative secrecy on education, immigration and the environment through her enigmatic group Emerson Collective, has gotten a lot more visible over the past 12 months. “You can’t invest quietly in media, it turns out,” Powell Jobs told journalist Kara Swisher last year.

Last summer, Emerson Collective acquired a majority stake in the Atlantic, which Powell Jobs, 54, wants to turn into “the English-language journalism enterprise for the world,” as the magazine’s now-minority owner, David Bradley, told the Washington Post. This year, the magazine announced it would hire 100 new employees, increasing its staff by almost a third. Beyond the Atlantic, Emerson has invested in nonprofit and for-profit media alike, including ProPublica, the Marshall Project, Axios, the podcasting network Gimlet and more. (Emerson also shuttered a new magazine that was to be edited by Leon Wieseltier, the former literary editor of the New Republic, for what it called “past inappropriate workplace conduct.”)

Powell Jobs is prone to big, if vague, thinking. (She told Walter Isaacson, who wrote a biography of her late husband, Steve Jobs, that when the couple shopped for furniture, “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’”) She calls herself a political independent and has said she won’t have “a long hand” in the editorial direction of her growing media portfolio. But she has also been blunt about wanting to use journalism to promote her center-left agenda. She told Swisher that creating a “cultural narrative” would help to “enhance and amplify” Emerson’s work in areas like pushing to grant legal status to Dreamers and enacting education reform.

—Chris Suellentrop

Portrait illustration by Cristiano Siqueira. Photo reference: Stephen Lam/Getty Images.

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