At 85, Martha Stewart says work-life balance rarely happens, and when it does, she has reservations. Asked how she fits a personal life around her business, she told Vivian Tu, “I’m jealous of those people,” before calling them “boring.”
She was speaking at an early-October 2026 live taping of SoFi’s Richer Lives podcast. Her answer included a blunt assessment: “You can’t balance it. It doesn’t balance.”
Stewart’s workload still includes her lifestyle business and Hint, the AI home-management app she cofounded with CEO Yih-Han Ma and CTO Kyle Rush. The app is designed to help homeowners catch problems such as leaks, expiring insurance and questionable utility bills.
Hint announced a $10 million seed round led by Slow Ventures in May 2026, followed by an iOS launch that summer. Rush has said Stewart holds equity as a cofounder. She met the engineer, who’s also her neighbor, at Easter brunch on her farm, and has said she’d wanted a digital home organizer since the 1990s.
Her daily routine helps explain how much space work occupies. In a September 2025 appearance on Lipstick on the Rim, Stewart said she gets up around 4 or 4:30 a.m. after about 4 hours of sleep. She reads the entire New York Times, plays puzzles and does Pilates or works with a trainer.
The often-cited 7 a.m. start comes from that earlier conversation and refers to workers arriving at her farm. As Stewart put it: “You have to be up and you have to show them that you’re as lively as they are.”
She’s been describing that overlap for years. At a National Association of Professional Women event in 2013, she said, “My life is my job, and my job is my life.” In June 2023, she argued against hybrid schedules: “You can’t possibly get everything done working three days a week in the office and two days remotely.”
In the conversation with Tu, Stewart said she moves on when something stops exciting her. “I like being able to look forward to what’s going to happen in the day, and the surprises are also good.”