Greetings from San Francisco.

I'm Teddy Schleifer. For those of you who have yet to subscribe to Puck, now is as good time as any. Sign up today and you’ll get access not only to my full column, but also the writing and private emails of the entire Puck team, including Matt Belloni, Julia Ioffe, Dylan Byers, Tina Nguyen, Baratunde Thurston, Peter Hamby, William D. Cohan, and more. 

In the meantime, I wanted to share a preview of my latest column on Laurene Powell Jobs and the evolution and growing pains of Emerson Collective, one of Silicon Valley’s many sprawling philanthropic empires that increasingly resemble corporate America. You can subscribe to read the full thing.

Can Laurene Powell Jobs Save the World?

Ten years after Steve Jobs’s death, Laurene Powell Jobs has transformed Emerson Collective into a sprawling enterprise aiming to rebuild media, overhaul immigration, reform education, and save the planet. Can the operation scale alongside the ambition?

This past June, Barack Obama jaunted off to visit with some old friends of Silicon Valley. Obama was coming to the cradle of innovation in part to learn more about disinformation campaigns, and any way that the technology industry might cure America’s trust crisis. And so he called a meeting—and asked none other than Laurene Powell Jobs to host him at the Palo Alto headquarters of Emerson Collective, her for-profit philanthropic enterprise, for the intimate reception, which sources told me was supposed to stay under wraps. The guest list was organized by Obama, not Powell Jobs, but the billionaire philanthropist, along with some people who happen to be her grantees, had the former president’s ear that day to explore one of his top post-presidency priorities. 

Obama, like many members of the American elite, wants to keep Powell Jobs close. He should. In an industry town where every billionaire philanthropist has a mission or two, Powell Jobs has stretched herself out over the last decade to have a million, with grand and sprawling aspirations to help rebuild American media, close the K-12 achievement gap, overhaul the immigration system and make money along the way.

Emerson has a unique DNA. Over the past several years, and again in recent weeks, I have spoken with current and former employees of Emerson, their grantees and other close observers of the firm to demystify its essence. There are always three common themes that emerge from those conversations. The first, most dominant one is Emerson’s opaqueness, which Emerson admits can make the firm seem secretive or insular. The for-profit philanthropy is structured as a privately held LLC, which means it doesn’t have to disclose key information about its gifts or assets, and its grantees are often told to not publicize their donations. Even the offices of Emerson are unmarked; I’ve heard hilarious stories over the years of guests being unable to find its Palo Alto headquarters. 

This lack of transparency can also inadvertently make Emerson look capricious. The philanthropy has a widely-shared, much-complained-about reputation in the nonprofit industry for being an impenetrable black box. One nonprofit head described catching Powell Jobs’ attention as akin to winning “the MacKenzie Scott lottery”—an insinuation that large funding decisions appear to be made far more covertly than industry standard...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT