Jackie Bezos, who funded her son Jeff’s start-up Amazon, dies at 78

Seattle - Mrs Jackie Bezos, a fierce protector of her son, Mr Jeff Bezos, before the latter founded Amazon.com and a deep-pocketed advocate for early childhood education, has died. She was 78.

Mrs Bezos died at her home in Miami on Aug 14, according to the Bezos Family Foundation’s website. In a tribute on social media, Mr Bezos wrote that his mother died “surrounded by so many of us who loved her”, saying her death followed “a long fight with Lewy body dementia”.

With her husband, Miguel, Mrs Bezos was the first to invest in Amazon. Their two cheques, totalling US$245,573 in 1995 (about S$350,000 then), backed the start-up that Mr Bezos warned would probably fail. It did not, of course, and the investment – along with subsequent purchases of Amazon shares – netted them a fortune estimated to be as large as US$30 billion in 2018.

Starting in 2000 – decades before their son or his company launched their own philanthropic endeavours – the couple funded educational programmes through the Bezos Family Foundation. For years, it was the highest-profile charity giving away a slice of the fortunes created by the e-commerce giant.

“At the core of the foundation’s work is Jackie’s belief that rigorous, inspired learning – in the classroom and in children’s hundreds of daily interactions with adults – will allow students from birth to high school to put their education into action,” the organisation says on its website.

It says her “vision” is behind two in-house programmes – Vroom, which disseminates parenting tips via an app and other methods, and the Bezos Scholars Programme, which chooses 17 young Americans and Africans to be trained in a leadership development programme each year.

The foundation has backed hundreds of other organisations, primarily focused on children and young adults. It made its biggest single gift in August 2024 – US$185.7 million to the Aspen Institute to underwrite a new centre focused on young people.

Born Jacklyn Marie Gise in Virginia on Dec 29, 1946, Mrs Bezos grew up in New Mexico, where her father, Mr Lawrence Preston Gise, was a senior official at the US Atomic Energy Commission, the agency that then oversaw US nuclear laboratories.

During her sophomore year in high school in Albuquerque, she became pregnant by Mr Theodore Jorgensen, a senior. They married in 1963 and their son, Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen, was born the following January.

Mrs Bezos moved back in with her parents and filed for divorce from Mr Jorgensen when their son was 17 months old.

Newly single, Mrs Bezos completed high school on conditions imposed by administrators: that she not speak to classmates, loiter on campus or attend graduation. She later enrolled in community college, seeking out professors who would permit her to bring a toddler to class.

It was around this time, while working in the Bank of New Mexico’s bookkeeping department, that she met Mr Miguel Bezos, a Cuban-born college student who was a night teller at the bank. He had arrived in the US at age 16, a refugee among the thousands of other children sent to live in the US after Fidel Castro’s revolution.

The two married in April 1968 and moved to Texas, where Mr Miguel Bezos took a job as a petroleum engineer with what became Exxon. They had two children: Christina, in 1969, and Mark, in 1970. Mr Jeff Bezos, who had no relationship with his biological father, was adopted by Mr Miguel Bezos and took the Bezos surname. 

Mrs Bezos got Jeff – a curious child who at age three took apart the walls of his crib so he could sleep in a bed – into a pilot programme for gifted pupils at a Houston elementary school. She did the same when the family later moved to Pensacola, Florida.

She indulged his passions, regularly ferrying him to consumer tech store Radio Shack so he could tinker with homemade electronics.  

After Mr Bezos gave up his New York hedge fund job to found Amazon near Seattle, his parents put much of their nest egg into the company – a decision they would later say was a bet on their son rather than the prospects of an internet bookseller.

When Amazon became a Wall Street darling after its 1997 initial public offering, Mrs Bezos visited newsstands to find stories about her son, then left the magazine open to that page. BLOOMBERG