Critically acclaimed fiction writer and Steve Jobs' biological sister, with a close role in the life of all his children. (Jobs also has a sister, Patty, from his adoptive family.) They became acquainted as adults. It is implied in most biographies that the Jobs-Simpson mid-life friendship helped mature Steve and bring him to a position where he was ready to commit to life with a woman like Laurene. For a while, Simpson was married to Simpsons writer/producer Richard Appel, and it is said that Homer Simpson’s mother is only coincidentally named Mona Simpson.

SImpson’s most famous book is probably A Regular Guy, thought to be a thinly veiled account of her half-brother at the first peak of his fame. That caused tensions with Lisa Brennan-Jobs, who wrote an article about it for the Harvard Advocate, an undergraduate literary magazine.

Given how little information on Powell or her children is available in the public record – which most people could probably understand – this account is heavily reliant on previous accounts of her life with Steve Jobs, who was also very tight-lipped about his family life and gave only infrequent access. (He had an infatuation with newfound celebrity in the early Eighties, the source of much information about his life.) Powell has become more of a public figure since his death, but there is little contextual information regarding her personal or professional life readily available to the public, even like anecdotes from philanthropic projects stating her giving philosophy or motivations for giving. From the Wealth Genius project’s philosophical perspective, it would be more preferable to address her exclusively as a woman, but she and he are pretty enmeshed in both the existing record and the harmony of the spheres.

Teach for America adopted a similar philosophy of site expansion after Gap CEO Mickey Drexler came in and he and others helped resurrect the organization from financialdifficulties in the late 1990s. One of TFA founder Wendy Kopp’s key early mentors was junk bond king Michael Milken, who sought out Milken at an early Nineties UCLA lecture on non-profit management in a way somehow spiritually similar to the Powell-Jobs meet cute. To completely unrelated and opposite ends, though Kopp also vaguely looks like Powell as an athletic blonde. Should stop writing about female CEOs as blondes.

Here’s a Harvard Business School “playbook” on how the Gates Foundation can help you support school reform. Looking into equivalent paraphernalia sponsored by Laurene Powell’s organizations.