There is no doubt that Laurene Powell Jobs, wife of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, is quite the philanthropist.
College Track, and organization she founded, helps underprivileged and first-generation immigrant children have a chance to go to college, while the Emerson Collective, which she also started, funds a diverse array of philanthropic causes.
However, the impression writer David Gelles gives in his Feb. 27 New York Times puff piece titled, “Laurene Powell Jobs Is Putting Her Own Dent in the Universe,” is that Powell Jobs is a victim of her inheritance and is eager to dispose with the vulgar burden of her $27.5 billion fortune.
Of course, any time a leftist is looking for “street cred,” the first order of business is to somehow lament the fact that she’s wealthy in the first place.
“As someone attuned to society’s structural inequalities,” Gelles wrote, “Ms. Powell Jobs grasps the immensity of her privilege.”
This is meant to exonerate her from being obscenely wealthy by virtue of that acknowledgment.
“It’s not right for individuals to accumulate a massive amount of wealth that’s equivalent to millions and millions of other people combined,” Powell Jobs, who The Times reported is the 35th-richest person in the world, said, apparently without a hint of irony despite her own excessive fortune. “There’s nothing fair about that.”
While she is indeed generous, her money often goes to supporting leftist causes and politicians, and she is quietly gobbling up media influence through the purchase of The Atlantic magazine and through Emerson Collectives’ support of left-leaning publication like Mother Jones and Pro Publica.
Among her favorite targets is President Donald Trump, and she uses her bully pulpit to rail against him for just about anything, including dead cacti:
As the wall goes up in Arizona, protected cacti are laid to ruin, a fragile landscape is damaged, and the outrage from native peoples is completely disregarded.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/us/…
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Despite all that her wealth has done for her, and despite the fact that she inherited her wealth from her husband, she has no desire to leave any of it to her children.
“I’m not interested in legacy wealth buildings, and my children know that,” she told The Times. “Steve wasn’t interested in that. If I live long enough, it ends with me.”
Of course, for someone who doesn’t seem all that interested in building wealth, she continues to make a whole lot of business decisions designed to do just that.
In fact, Powell Jobs spent her early career working on Wall Street for Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, according to Business Insider, which is not exactly the kind of career someone who has a problem with making money would pursue.
As recently as 2017, Powell Jobs invested in Monumental Sports and Entertainment, which owns both the Washington Capitals and Washington Wizards.
She also purchased a $16.5 million home in 2018 in San Francisco — a city where where inequality abounds, as the wealthy occupy mansions and the homeless live in tents in waste-covered streets, adding to her already sizable real estate holdings.
Her hypocritical view on wealth is par for the course on the left.
Consider that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate who is himself a millionaire, asserts that “billionaires should not exist,” even though society clearly benefits from them:
Powell Jobs is determined to keep her children from inheriting her wealth to make up for the supposed sins of the uber-rich of yesteryear.
“We saw that at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries with the Rockefellers and Carnegies and Mellons and Fords of the world. That kind of accumulation of wealth is dangerous for a society. It shouldn’t be this way,” she told The Times.
Like Powell Jobs is trying to do herself, those titans of industry changed the world with philanthropy, contributions to the arts and innovations that changed the way people lived.
For instance, John Rockerfeller Sr. funded scientific research that resulted in vaccines for yellow fever.
It’s not hard to see the hypocrisy. Powell Jobs clearly enjoys the spoils of her massive inheritance while at the same time promising her children won’t see a dime of it because that wealth is immoral in the first place.
As Steve Jobs’ widow, it’s fitting that she embodies the spirit of Silicon Valley, where rich liberals lament income inequality as they drive by squalid tent cities on the way to their comfortable mansions.
There’s something especially distasteful about the fact that she’s robbing her own children of their birthright to atone for the modern day sin of being wealthy.
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