March 18, 1991: Steve Jobs marries 27-year-old Laurene Powell less than two years after a chance meeting.
The couple’s friends and family attend the wedding, which takes place at Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park in central California.
Steve Jobs marries Laurene Powell
Jobs met Powell in October 1989, shortly after the NeXT Computer debuted. He gave a lecture at Stanford Business School, titled “View From the Top.”
Powell, a graduate student at the school, arrived late for Jobs’ presentation. She wound up getting a front-row seat and, afterward, talked with the Apple co-founder. According to Powell, she didn’t know exactly who Jobs was at the time — and even confused him with Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
A chance meeting?
Others who knew both Laurene Powell and Steve Jobs disagreed with her recollection, suggesting that she set out to meet him.
“Laurene is nice, but she can be calculating, and I think she targeted him from the beginning,” former Macintosh software engineer Andy Hertzfeld told Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson.
Either way, Jobs skipped a business meeting after his lecture and asked Powell out on a date that very night.
“I was in the parking lot, with the key in the car, and I thought to myself, ‘If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting, or with this woman?'” Jobs said, according to Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different: A Biography. “I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she’d have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town and we’ve been together ever since.”
Jobs asked her to marry him on the first day of 1990. However, once she accepted, he stopped mentioning their engagement. After a fractious few months, Jobs finally bought her a wedding ring in October 1990.
Steve Jobs marries Laurene Powell at last
The Jobs-Powell wedding took place in March 1991. Around 50 people attended, including Jobs’ adoptive father, Paul Jobs, and his younger sister, Mona Simpson. The service — overseen by Zen Buddhist monk Kōbun Chino Otogawa, who struck a gong and lit incense — proved confusing to many attendees.
After the ceremony, the group ate a vegan wedding cake shaped like the Half Dome rock formation that towers over one end of Yosemite Valley. Then they went hiking in the snow.
At the time of the wedding, Laurene Powell was pregnant with the couple’s oldest child, Reed. Two more children, Erin Sienna and Eve, followed.
Jobs and Powell remained married until he died at the age of 56 in late 2011. She continues to do philanthropic work with the Emerson Collective and the XQ Institute, two organizations she founded. And in 2022, she launched the Steve Jobs Archive, an organization whose “curated exhibits and publications draw on material from our private archival collection and reflect Steve’s deep respect for the past.”
Before meeting Powell, Jobs dated Tina Redse. They enjoyed an on-again, off-again relationship for several years. The couple even discussed marriage, but Redse says she turned down a proposal from Jobs.
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
