Working wives of successful CEOs

McDonald`s late founder Ray Kroc, who led the spectacular success of the fast food chain, changed his wife whenever his business took off. His third wife Joanne, a beautiful blonde, was a married woman but he paid a huge sum of alimony to get a divorce from his second wife and have Joanne get a divorce to marry her. To real estate mogul Donald Trump, who once said “Business is a game,” marriage also seems to be a game. Whenever he remarried, his wife got younger in age. A young beautiful wife whom a successful man remarries after dumping his original wife is called a “trophy wife,” because she is like spoils from victory in war.

IT entrepreneurs run their businesses under the motto of creativity and innovation, but their spouses are a far cry from trophy wives. In a lecture at Stanford University in fall 1989, Steve Jobs unexpectedly mumbled and looked nervous. The person who distracted him was Laurene Powell, then an MBA student at the university. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and its Wharton School of Business, Powell was a high-powered individual who had worked for Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs on Wall Street. Though Powell married Jobs when he was a millionaire and featured on the cover of Time magazine, she did not simply sit on the sidelines. She has set up the organic food company Terabera and run the educational philanthropic business College Track.

Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, hails from Palo Alto, California, where Facebook is based. With a Ph.D in biology from Yale University, she is an entrepreneur who co-founded 23 & Me, a bio venture that deciphers genomic data, in 2006. Brin married Wojcicki in strict secrecy in the Bahamas a year after he founded Google. Lucy Southworth, the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, is pursuing a Ph.D in biology at Stanford. Marrying a professional woman is advantageous because she is considered not to nag or interfere with her husband because she has her own world.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the world`s youngest billionaire, tied the knot with his longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan in a surprise move Saturday, a day after the social networking site was listed on Wall Street. A graduate of the University of California-Berkeley`s School of Medicine, Chan rejected Zuckerberg’s offer to work at Facebook and has started work as a pediatrician, instead. Founders of IT businesses seem to prefer intelligent professional women rather than gorgeous blondes, who focus on nail art on luxurious couches. IT moguls gain inspiration from their wives when setting business plans and operating businesses. Their wives also look great as they take their own paths rather than relying on the wealth and fame of their husbands.

Editorial Writer Chung Sung-hee (shchung@donga.com)