Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene, 59, shuttles back to her $120m luxury yacht Venus in Barbados

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs has been pictured shuttling back to her $120million luxury yacht during a holiday in Barbados.

Powell, 59, had spent Sunday afternoon visiting the luxury 5-star hotel Sandy Lane’s restaurants, shops and spas.

The billionaire and philanthropist, wearing shorts, a floaty shirt and a sunhat, was pictured climbing on to a dingy after her shopping trip.

She was then shuttled across the North Atlantic Ocean back to her $120million luxury yacht Venus, which was designed by Jobs before his death.

Powell was left widowed after Jobs passed away, age 56, from complications from pancreatic cancer in October 2011. They had three children together and Powell is also step-mother to Jobs’ daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs.

When Jobs died, most of his assets passed on to his wife, making her one of the 50 richest people in the world.

Powell married Jobs in 1991 – ten years before the release of the first iPod – and now manages a fortune estimated to be worth $12.3 billion according to Forbes.

 

In addition to the Venus, she owns two private jets, four large real estate properties and a large stake in the Walt Disney Company.

The Venus was Steve Jobs’ final masterpiece, after he commissioned it in 2008 and worked painstakingly on the design with superstar French product designer Philippe Starck.

He did not survive to see the ship completed and launched, dying of pancreatic cancer a year before work was finished in 2012.

In his final years, Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson: ‘I know that it’s possible I will die and leave Laurene with a half-built boat. But I have to keep going on it. If I don’t, it’s an admission that I’m about to die.’ 

Starck helped design the sleek 256-foot long vessel, and Jobs enlisted the chief engineer of the Apple Stores to design reinforced glass for its walls, according to his biographer Walter Isaacson. 

Starck spoke about Venus in an interview with French Vanity Fair, explaining the yacht houses six bedrooms along with communication systems between the kids’ rooms in the front and the adult quarters in the rear.

‘Steve wanted to be sure that the teenagers could be set up in the front of the boat when he was at the back and vice-versa. He was obsessed with silence,’ Starck said.

‘In his home, children did not make noise, nor the dog, nor his wife … no one made any noise, ever.’

The 255ft yacht is made of light-weight aluminium and Jobs employed the chief engineer of his Apple stores to help design special glass that allowed the ship to be installed with ten-foot-high windows across the hull.

The yacht can fit 12 guests on board in six suites as well as 22 crewmembers.

The interior also features 27-Mac computer screens, with large cabin windows along the yacht.

As a token gift of appreciation, Jobs’ family gave out a custom iPod Shuffle engraved with the name of the yacht to each member of the crew who helped build it. Each one came with a note thanking them for their ‘hard work and craftsmanship.’

Looking like a floating Apple store, the yacht bears all the hallmarks of a new Jobs-inspired creation — crisp white lines, polished metal, glass. 

The superyacht has a long white hull with a row of circular portholes just above the water line and two glass-walled cabins on the top deck, one on top of the other. 

In 2012, the Venus was briefly impounded in Amsterdam in a dispute over unpaid bills to the designer Starck, but the issue was resolved after several days.

Meanwhile, Powell’s fortune mainly comes from the Walt Disney Company shares she inherited from her husband.

Those shares were worth $7.4 billion when he sold Pixar, his animation studio, to Disney in 2006. It has since increased to more than $12.7 billion.

Powell is the founder and president of the Emerson Collective, an investment firm focusing on good causes including education, immigration, health and the environment.

Last year, it emerged that Powell will invest $3.5 billion within the next 10 years to address the climate crisis, a spokesperson for Emerson Collective said. 

The money will go into Waverley Street Foundation, an organization Jobs set up in 2016, and focus on ‘initiatives and ideas to help underserved communities most impacted by climate change,’ the spokesperson said. 

‘Efforts will focus on housing, transportation, food security, and health.’ 

Powell has done most of her work through Emerson Collective, which focuses on education, immigration reform and environmental causes, and has other media investments and grants in film, TV production and journalism.