Laurene Powell Jobs sets San Francisco real estate record with $70 million purchase

Entrepreneur and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs purchased a home in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights for a record-breaking $70 million. 

The property was sold off-market by lawyer and author Sloan Lindemann Barnett, daughter of billionaire art collector George Lindemann, and her husband, Roger Barnett, CEO of a health supplement company, according to anonymous sources cited by the Wall Street Journal.

The Barnetts acquired the Spanish Renaissance Revival Palacio at 2840 Broadway for $33 million in 2011 through a limited liability company, records show. The grand estate features white onyx-paneled walls, mirrored ornamental columns and sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge. 

Initially, the Barnetts sought more than $100 million for the property, the sources said.

This transaction surpasses the previous record for the most expensive home sale in San Francisco, a Pacific Heights property sold for $43.5 million in 2021.

Architectural Digest, in a January 2021 article, said the mansion at 2840 Broadway has “been described, with good reason, as the most beautiful house in America.”  

The property is positioned next to the former estate of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison and adjacent to the home of Apple designer Jonathan Ive, on San Francisco’s renowned Billionaire’s Row. Previously owned by international society hostess and haute couture collector Dodie Rosekrans, the mansion was originally built in 1916 and underwent renovations under the Barnetts’ ownership.

Laurene Powell Jobs, 60, is the founder of the Emerson Collective, an organization focused on investment, philanthropy and advocacy. She married Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1991 after meeting him during a lecture at Stanford Business School, where she was a student. The couple had three children before he died in 2011.

Powell Jobs made headlines earlier this year with the purchase of a $94 million oceanfront property in Malibu’s Paradise Cove, adjacent to her existing property there. She previously purchased a $16.5 million home in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood in 2018.

Reflecting on her wealth, Powell Jobs once remarked, “My relationship with money is that it’s a tool to be self-sufficient, but it’s not something that is a part of who I am.”

Her net worth rose by twice the price of the Pacific Heights home on Friday, according to Forbes.