Jackie Bezos, who funded her son Jeff’s Amazon startup, dies at 78

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

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

With her husband, Miguel, Bezos was the first to invest in Amazon. Their two cheques, totalling $245,573 in 1995, backed the startup that Jeff Bezos warned would probably fail. It didn’t, of course, and the investment - along with subsequent purchases of Amazon shares - netted them a fortune estimated to be as large as $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 kids and young adults. It made its biggest single gift in August 2024 - $185.7 million to the Aspen Institute to underwrite a new centre focused on young people.

Jacklyn Marie Gise was born in Virginia on Dec. 29, 1946. She grew up in New Mexico, where her father, 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 Theodore Jorgensen, a senior. They married in 1963 and their son, Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen, was born the following January. Jacklyn, known as Jackie, moved back in with her parents and filed for divorce from Jorgensen when their son was 17 months old.

Jorgensen, a unicycle polo player who would later run a bicycle shop, acknowledged that he wasn’t a particularly good father or husband. “It was really all my fault,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek editor Brad Stone for his book, The Everything Store. (2013). “I don’t blame Jackie at all.” Jorgensen died in 2015.

Newly single, Jackie 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 Miguel Bezos, known as Mike, 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. According to Stone’s book, Jackie turned him down several times before finally agreeing to go on a date, to see The Sound of Music.

The two married in April 1968 and moved to Texas, where Mike took a job as a petroleum engineer with what became Exxon Corp. They had two children: Christina, in 1969, and Mark, in 1970.

Jeff, who had no relationship with his biological father, was adopted by Miguel and took the Bezos surname.

Jackie “ran a household steeped in board games, science projects and storytelling,” Mark Leibovich wrote in The New Imperialists (2002), his book profiling Jeff Bezos and other business titans of the 21st century.

Jackie was a “foremost protector and all-purpose support system” for Jeff, Leibovich wrote.

In one example, Jackie got Jeff - a curious child who at age 3 took apart the walls of his crib so he could sleep in a bed - into a pilot programme for gifted students at a Houston elementary school. She did the same when the family later moved to Pensacola, Florida.

“You don’t just go away,” she told Leibovich. “You don’t go gently. You just keep trying to convince people.”

She indulged Jeff’s passions, regularly ferrying him to Radio Shack so he could tinker with homemade electronics.

Mike Bezos climbed the ladder at Exxon, moving the family to Miami, where Jeff graduated from high school. Mike’s later work sent him and Jackie to Norway and Colombia.

During a stint in New Jersey, Jackie, then 40 years old, earned a degree from the College of Saint Elizabeth (now Saint Elizabeth University) in Morris Township.

After Jeff 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, Jackie visited newsstands to find stories about her son, then left the magazine open to that page, Leibovich wrote.

In 2000, Jackie and Mike, who by then had retired from Exxon, moved to the Seattle area to be closer to Jeff’s growing family.

In Seattle, Jackie Bezos wrote occasional opinion pieces in the local newspaper, advocating for early childhood education. She and Mike donated in support of an ultimately successful voter initiative that established state charter schools in Washington and against a proposal to implement an income tax in the state. Voters rejected the tax.

The couple were frequent donors to Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Centre, including a $710 million gift in 2022 made outside of the foundation.

They kept homes in Colorado and Texas and in recent years spent much of their time living in Miami.