Serena Williams Is Still at the Top of Her Game 

This story is part of the 2025 TIME100. Read Allyson Felix’s tribute to Serena Williams here.

Serena Williams sits back in the driver’s seat of her light blue Lincoln Navigator, as darkness turns to light one recent South Florida morning. An interview that was supposed to start close to noon got pushed up, on very short notice, to the ungodly hour of 6:20 a.m. Something unexpected came up with her daughters—Olympia, 7, and Adira, 1—that required a pre-dawn rescheduling. Given Williams’ hectic life since she announced, nearly three years ago, that she was “evolving away from tennis”—she purposely avoided saying retirement—a last-minute request to shuffle things around didn’t come as a big surprise. But no one was thrilled with the new appointment time, least of all a bleary-eyed Williams. “Oh my God, this is the worst,” she says.

We’re in the driveway of her family’s five-acre farm because her in-laws are sleeping inside the house. “We basically eat off the land,” says Williams of the property on which she and her husband, Reddit co-founder and investor Alexis Ohanian, grow berries, tomatoes, kale, and other crops while raising chickens. A basketball hoop stands to our left, which seems fitting at this moment in time: a few weeks earlier, Williams announced that she was joining the ownership group of the Toronto Tempo, a WNBA expansion team that will take the court in 2026. It is yet another addition to an already full plate that includes running her investment firm and raising two children with Ohanian, with the occasional high-profile moment like calling out Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, who had suggested a woman’s most important title is homemaker, when she hosted last year’s ESPYs or, making a surprise appearance dancing at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show.

As our sleepiness wears off, I ask her if she misses tennis, expecting a canned answer about how that part of her life is now behind her. But I should have known better. Dull has never been Williams’ style. “I miss it a lot, with all my heart,” she responds. “I miss it because I’m healthy.” In other words, her body feels good enough that she’s confident, even at 43, she could still pile up some wins on tour. “If I couldn't walk, or if I was so out of it, I wouldn’t miss it as much,” Williams says. I wonder if she’s healthy because she stopped playing. “I think I’m healthy because I didn’t overplay,” she says. Williams, who has 23 Grand Slam singles titles, still hits around—there’s a tennis court on the farm. And after George Foreman died, just four days prior to our meeting, a comeback did cross her mind. “He was champion at 45,” Williams notes.

It’s a tantalizing prospect, for sure. But a tennis return remains highly unlikely. “I just can't peel myself away from these children,” says Williams. “Another reason I had to transition was because I wanted to have more kids. And I look at Adira and I'm like, ‘Was it worth it?’ I literally thought about it the other day. I was like, ‘Yeah, it was definitely worth it.’”

Order your copy of the 2025 TIME100 issue here

So tennis marches on without Williams, as a plethora of talented players—Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Swiatek, Coco Gauff, Madison Keys, and others—continue to duke it out, tournament after tournament, to fill the void she left behind. But Williams never planned on fading away. She’s followed through, for example, on her promise to pour her energy into growing as a businesswoman: Over the past 15 years, Williams has put her own money into more than 120 companies, 14 of them valued at $1 billion or more. Her company, Serena Ventures, has raised over $100 million of outside capital to invest in more than 30 companies since 2021. Deal flow at Serena Ventures has quadrupled in the last year. She joined the Tempo at an ascendant moment for the WNBA, which tips off its 2025 campaign in mid-May. Last season, the league set attendance and viewership records. Williams has ambitions of propelling it further. She has also signed on as an executive producer of Netflix's adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid's best-selling novel Carrie Soto Is Back, about a tennis champion who comes out of retirement to reclaim her Grand Slam record.

Meanwhile, the Super Bowl dance illustrated that even though she’s no longer acing opponents on the Wimbledon grass, the power of Serena endures. Just as, at various points during her athletic career, she sparked conversations about racism, sexism, sportsmanship, decorum, and a whole host of issues that extended far beyond the tennis court, her crip walk, in front of some 200 million people tuning in around the world, during Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance of “Not Like Us”—his diss track aimed at fellow rapper Drake—caused a commotion. Was Williams’ Black cultural expression a form of political resistance against a President aiming to squash diversity initiatives in American life? Was this act appropriate at the Super Bowl, ostensibly one of the few remaining unifying events remaining on the calendar? Was she settling old scores with an ex-boyfriend (Drake)?

In the less than five seconds she appeared on television that night, barely a blip on the screen, she rocketed back into our collective consciousness. In the Navigator, while breaking down the whole affair, Williams arrives at a simple conclusion. 

“That’s such a Serena moment.” 

Before her final professional tennis match, a three-hour Friday night epic in New York City that she lost to Australia’s Ajla Tomljanović at the 2022 U.S. Open, Williams told TIME she was stepping away from the game, in part, to evolve as a mom. “I think I’m good at it,” she said of parenthood. “But I want to explore if I can be great at it.”

Nearly three years on, has she achieved greatness in this realm? “I’m a wonderful mom,” Williams says. “I think we, as women, don’t give ourselves credit, but I’m a great mom. I really am. I do everything. I'm freaking the room mom at Olympia’s school this year.” 

Williams gave birth to Adira less than a year after hanging up her racquet, and she’s had to grapple with a challenge familiar to most, if not all, parents of second children: doting on the new arrival at the expense of the older sibling. “I try to be less on baby, but she's just so cute,” says Williams. “How do you not give her all the attention in the world? Oh my God. It’s so hard.” Peeling herself away from Adira as she goes to pick up Olympia from school is more difficult than she envisioned. And as the youngest sister in her own family, she also cops to taking Adira’s side during rare squabbles between the sisters. (She says they get along great.) “When Olympia tells Adira no, I'm just like, ‘Excuse me, you have to share’ because it's triggering,” she says. 

In that same pre-retirement interview, Williams said she got “more love and more joy out of what I do in the VC space” than from tennis. That passion for business has endured. While many athletes simply lend their name to such financial enterprises, Williams actually does the work. The founders of Serena Ventures-backed start-ups often have a line into Williams herself. “She’s giving her direct cell phone to a lot of people,” says Beth Ferreira, the firm’s general partner. Williams sometimes mitigates disputes between company executives, according to Ferreira, or sits in on legal calls. “In my past life, I’ve worked with other athletes, and they’re usually very in the background,” says Ferreira. “This is different. I’ve tried to pull her out of the weeds.”

Ferreira, who previously worked for a New York venture-capital firm that early-stage invested in companies like Airbnb, Shopify, and DraftKings, would prefer that Williams spend even more of her time opening doors for the fund’s portfolio companies. Two other well-known venture-capital funds, for example, promised to introduce a start-up’s founders to a Fortune 100 executive, but ultimately couldn’t make it happen. “Serena not only got them the meeting by the next day, but she also walked them into the meeting and stayed for the meeting,” says Ferreira.

Some companies expect to leverage Williams’ celebrity. “One of the challenges is, people are like, ‘Can you do this picture or post?’” says Williams. Sometimes she will plug a business to her 18.1 million Instagram followers, because it can only help her investment. “But that's the least part that I bring, posting about something which lives on social media for 10 seconds and people forget,” says Williams. “The best part about what we bring, as a firm, is that we make introductions that firms with 20 years’ experience make.”

According to Serena Ventures, nearly 70% of the companies in which the firm invests were founded by women or people of color, including online marketplace Rebel, which sells discounted baby products and other home essentials that have been returned to retailers and would otherwise be headed for a landfill, and Esusu, a fintech company that helps renters, particularly immigrants, build credit scores. And Williams doesn’t intend to alter her strategy because of President Trump’s policies targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. “We are obviously going to lean into that, because my team is filled with inclusion, because we're women,” says Williams, who quickly adds that Serena Ventures would like to hire a man. “We like to partner with people that believe in that too. It's a free world. People are going to do what they want to do. And I can't let that affect how I do things. I'm going to do the things that I think are right.” 

While Serena Ventures may branch out into sports investments, Williams is putting her own cash into the Tempo. She first fell in love with women’s basketball, she says, during her years seeing the U.S. national team up close while at the Olympics, starting in 2000: Williams, who herself won four Olympic tennis gold medals, points to players like Lisa Leslie and Diana Taurasi as inspirations. The way last season’s WNBA rookie sensation, Caitlin Clark, handled all the fevered debates that surrounded her also left an impression.

“I felt like she’s always herself, she stayed out of it, just muted the noise,” says Williams. “She has this maturity that I didn’t have.” Clark did have the benefit of being in college when she attracted the national spotlight, while Williams started playing on tour at age 14. But Clark, at just 23, has already learned to tune out distractions like the latest online outrage, something Williams got better at later in her career. "I felt like she was, like me, purposely staying away," says Williams. "I respect that. Kudos to her."

About a year ago, Williams publicly expressed interest in owning a WNBA team. Women’s team sports valuations are surging, and Williams does not believe it’s a bubble that will burst. “With AI coming in, it's going to affect so many different industries,” says Williams. “But the one thing it's not going to affect is sports. They’re the last real thing that you can see and hold and feel.”  

A few weeks after the Tempo were awarded an expansion franchise in May 2024, WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert asked Tempo majority owner Larry Tanenbaum if he had any room for Williams in his group. “It took me exactly five seconds, maybe not even that long, to say of course,” says Tanenbaum. The duo connected and clicked. It didn’t hurt that Toronto was one of Williams’ favorite stops on the Women’s Tennis Association tour. The Canadian Open alternates for the women each summer between Toronto and Montreal: Williams won all three of her tournament titles in Toronto. “You spend so much time at these places and get to know the insides of the city,” she says. “You get to know the restaurants, you get to know people, you get to know just festivals and all kinds of stuff. I got to know the karaoke rooms.” 

She’s throwing herself into the job. Williams, along with Tanenbaum and team president Teresa Resch, took part in the interview process that landed the Tempo its first general manager, former WNBA player and assistant general manager of the Phoenix Mercury, Monica Wright Rogers. Williams asked Wright Rogers what she thought was the most important aspect of player experience with the team. Wright Rogers emphasized resources for nutrition and recovery and analytics to optimize performance. “Right answer,” Williams said. She requested a follow-up conversation, one-on-one, to confirm the leadership team's hunch that Wright Rodgers was the correct choice.

The Tempo is betting that Williams can help the team, and the WNBA at large, accelerate its international growth, which has lagged behind the more established men’s game. “We’re truly positioned to be the global catalyst for this league,” says Resch. “The WNBA is a rocket ship in North America. But worldwide, there’s no great exposure. And I don't know if there's a bigger global brand than Serena Williams.”

It took some nine months for Williams to finalize her deal with the Tempo. Her Super Bowl booking came together much quicker. A couple of weeks before the game, Lamar, a 22-time Grammy winner and Pulitzer Prize winner who like Williams was born and raised in Compton, Calif., reached out to her. “We’ve been trying to do something together for ages,” she says. Lamar had watched Williams do the crip walk, a West Coast dance move that originated with first-generation members of the Crips, a Los Angeles gang, on the supposedly sacrosanct Wimbledon surface after winning the gold medal at the 2012 London Olympics. She received some blowback in the media. One columnist compared her dance to “cracking a tasteless, X-rated joke inside a church.”

Lamar, however, appreciated that Williams represented hip-hop culture on the world stage and wanted her to do it again. “I'm like, ‘Wait, what, you're asking me?’” says Williams. “I'm not Taylor Swift, let's be honest. I would have a better chance to be quarterback at the Super Bowl than dance.” 

Williams knew, going in, she would be dancing to “Not Like Us,” Lamar’s incendiary 2024 hit that won five Grammys in February. In his 2022 song, “Middle of the Ocean,” Drake sang, “Sidebar, Serena, your husband a groupie.” In “Not Like Us,” Lamar tells Drake he’d “better not speak on Serena,” and, in very unsubtle fashion, accuses Drake of sexual impropriety with minors. (Drake has denied all such allegations and has sued the Universal Music Group, the record company behind “Not Like Us,” for defamation; UMG has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.) Williams had previously danced to “Not Like Us” at the ESPYs, joking, “If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that none of us, not a single one of us, not even me, should ever pick a fight with Kendrick Lamar. He will make your hometown not like you. The next time Drake sits courtside at a Raptors game, they’re going to Forrest Gump him. Seats taken.” But this was clearly much bigger.

Williams strategized with her team: would the negativity her appearance could spark be worth the thrill of performing at halftime? The opportunity to amplify her hometown to the globe—again—was too good to pass up. “Who would have thought that a tennis player from Compton would be regarded as one of the best tennis players of all time?” she says. “It was just putting an exclamation on it.”

These days, Williams spends her days listening to Gracie’s Corner, a YouTube channel for kids. “Eenie, meenie, miny, moe/ Take big steps like an elephant, go,” is one lyrical sampling. She leans forward in the car and puts her hands over her face, recalling her reaction as she listened to the, er, less gentle words of “Not Like Us” in her earbuds and at rehearsals as the halftime show got closer. “Ohhhh my God,” she says.

She took a couple of shots of tequila before going onto the Caesars Superdome field in New Orleans. They weren't calming her nerves, but her handlers discouraged her from taking a third. Despite the butterflies, Williams danced with aplomb, as viewers exclaimed, “Wait a second, is that Serena Williams?!”

Then the fallout commenced. The FCC received some 125 complaints about Lamar’s performance, with one even singling out Williams for promoting “gang affiliation.” Many took her crip walk as a direct shot at Drake. “I don't know if I regret it or not,” she says now of her decision to dance. “I don't know the answer to that.”

So was Williams throwing shade at Drake? “Absolutely not,” she says. “I would never do that. And that was sad, that anyone would ever think that. I respect how they could. Obviously I can see how someone would think that. But absolutely not. I have never had negative feelings towards him. We’ve known him for so many years.”

ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith—who recently signed a reported $100 million contract with the network—weighed in, claiming that if he were married to Williams, he’d divorce her over the halftime show. “If I’m married and my wife is going to join trolling her ex, go back to his ass,” Smith said on the show First Take. “’Cause clearly you don’t belong with me. What you worried about him for and you’re with me? Bye-bye.”

Williams caught Smith’s reaction. “I thought it was hilarious,” she says. “He’s allowed to have his personal opinion. But did you see my husband’s remark? It was so eloquent.” Ohanian replied to Smith on social media, with a thread that included a reminder that Williams received criticism for crip-walking at the Olympics and a clip of the victorious Philadelphia Eagles players dancing to “Not Like Us” in the Super Bowl locker room. “This is bigger than the music,” Ohanian wrote. 

“And I'm like, dude, like, we literally are investing in the world, both of us,” says Williams. Ohanian owns a stake in Angel City FC, the National Women’s Soccer League team, and started an all-women’s track event last year. “We’re investing in women and in sports,” she says. “This is literally the last thing on our minds. Come on.” 

That evening, the couple was more concerned with securing an autograph from Swift, who was at the game supporting her boyfriend, Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Swift had been greeted by boos—presumably from Eagles fans—in New Orleans. “Why would you boo her?” says Williams. “That’s so mean. That’s just awful.” Olympia waited with her mom and dad outside Swift’s suite, hoping to catch her exiting the area. 

“I’m such a mom. I was ready to go in here myself and be like, ‘Taylor, come get this girl,’” says Williams. But since the Eagles were trouncing the Kelce’s Chiefs, she wanted to respect Swift’s space. “It’s hard when your team is losing,” says Williams. “I totally get it.” 

So Olympia’s Swift autograph will have to wait. “My husband and I, we’re so in a different space,” she says. “We’re so connected, we’re so in love, we’re just, like, trying to get our daughter Taylor Swift autographs. And nothing else.” 

Williams does still care about tennis. She’s a big fan, for example, of Jannik Sinner, the emergent Italian star who’s won the last two Australian Opens and is the defending U.S. Open champion. “Fantastic personality,” says Williams. “I love the guy, I love this game. He’s great for the sport.” She admits, however, that she was surprised by the three-month suspension he was given for testing positive for a performance-enhancing substance a year ago. According to Sinner, a physio inadvertently gave him the substance. The International Tennis Integrity Agency agreed with his explanation, determining that the amount was so small that it didn’t give him a competitive advantage, but the World Anti-Doping Agency pushed for a one-year ban. The parties reached a settlement in February, and while Sinner is currently sitting out tournaments, he won’t have to miss a major. Some players have accused the game’s officials of giving the top-ranked Sinner favorable treatment.

Williams wants to be crystal-clear: she wishes Sinner no ill will. “I’ve been put down so much, I don’t want to bring anyone down,” she says, adding that she’s excited to see his return to the tour, at the Italian Open in early May. “Men’s tennis needs him.” But, she says, “if I did that, I would have gotten 20 years. Let's be honest. I would have gotten Grand Slams taken away from me.” Williams says she was always extra careful about what went into her body, taking nothing stronger than Advil for fear of ingesting something that could get her in trouble. A performance-enhancing-drugs scandal would have landed her “in jail,” she says, with a laugh. “You would have heard about it in another multiverse.”

She also wonders what her contemporary and occasional rival, Maria Sharapova, is thinking. Sharapova got a two-year doping ban back in 2016 (on appeal it was reduced to 15 months), despite the fact a tennis governing body determined that her offense was, like Sinner’s, unintentional. “Just weirdly and oddly, I can't help but think about Maria all this time,” says Williams. “I can't help but feel for her.” (Sharapova declined to comment.)

With those thoughts off her chest, Williams gets out of the Navigator and offers a tour of her farm. She says that growing up in Compton, she never could have imagined a life of growing peppers and collecting eggs. “I never thought I had a green thumb,” she says.

One corner of the property houses bees. “We get so much honey it’s insane,” she says. Williams dehydrates the farm’s Moringa leaves, which are packed with antioxidants, to make tea. She is in frequent touch with her friend Meghan Markle, who has a colossal garden at her California home. “I’m always like, ‘Girl, what are you doing today?’” says Williams. “So we're trading recipes.”

She plans on adding a padel court on the property: padel, like pickleball, is a fast-growing racquet sport (in padel, you play the ball off of walls). “I’m clearly good at padel,” Williams says. “I’m not great at it. It’s a learning curve.” A trio of playhouses line a paved mini-road, replete with an “East Stockton St.” sign, in honor of her childhood address in Compton. She intends to put a number on each of the playhouses: 1117, her house number in Compton; 313, the address for the Florida home she shared with her sister Venus for two decades; and the number of Ohanian’s childhood home in Maryland. 

A farmhand offers to pluck some mint for Williams and informs her that some purple sweet potatoes will be coming. Mangoes, blueberries, and raspberries will be growing in soon. “You crushed the Super Bowl, by the way,” she tells Williams. “Oh my God. I was like, ‘There's my boss, that’s lit!’”

Despite her continued longing for the sport she once dominated, Williams is clear on why she made the decision she did. As a person who fully commits to everything she does, she knows she has to be selective about where she devotes her energy, and right now her priorities are not on the court. She also suspects the itch she feels to keep competing will fade over time. “Hopefully I'll feel better when I feel like, physically, I'm not able to have wins over some people,” she says. “I've given my whole life to tennis. And I would gladly give another two years if I had time. But it's nice to do something different. I'm content.”

Styled by Solange Franklin; set design by Ceci Garcia; hair by Angela Meadows; make-up by Natasha Gross; production by Petty Cash

On the cover:

Top by Alaia, skirt by David Koma, shoes by Gianvito Rossi, earrings and necklace by Vhernier, watch by Audemar Piguet, anklet is Williams’ own

On the inside:

Jacket by Helsa, shoes by Khaite, tights by Falke, belt and earrings by Patricia von Musilin

Jumpsuit by Sergio Hudson, shoes by Paris Texas, earrings by Van Cleef & Arpels, watch by Audemar Piguet