Jackie Bezos, who has died aged 78, helped to launch her son Jeff on the path to becoming a multi-billionaire by providing an initial investment of $245,000 to create the online retailer Amazon.
In 1995 Jeff Bezos, then a 30-year-old engineer and computer scientist, came up with the idea of an online bookselling site and approached his mother and stepfather for funds. He had calculated that any new internet business had a 10 per cent chance of succeeding, and extended Amazon’s odds to 30 per cent because of his own considerable capabilities: therefore, he told them, the business had a 70 per cent likelihood of failure.
Although Jackie and Mike Bezos did not have a strong grasp of the technology involved – “The internet? What’s that?” was their initial response – they gladly handed over the bulk of their retirement fund. “We talked about it for two minutes,” Jackie Bezos recalled. “We didn’t invest in Amazon, we invested in Jeff.”
With a six per cent stake in the company, Jackie Bezos and her husband were estimated in 2018 to be worth $30 billion, a return on their investment of around 12 million per cent.
Described by one of Jeff Bezos’s biographers as “an attractive, square-jawed brunette”, Jackie Bezos became a generous philanthropist and an admired motivational speaker, able to point out that, even before her son’s success, she had defied those who had written her off when she gave birth to Jeff while still at school.
Jackie Bezos presenting the Good Pitch during the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival in New York: she became a generous philanthropist and an admired motivational speaker – Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival
Jacklyn Gise was born in Washington on December 29 1946, to Lawrence Preston Gise, a regional director of the Atomic Energy Commission, and his wife Mattie, née Strait. The family later moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
In 1963, aged 16, Jackie became pregnant by her boyfriend, an alcoholic circus unicyclist called Ted Jorgensen; they rapidly married, and Jeff was born two weeks after Jackie’s 17th birthday. The marriage was dissolved after 18 months and Ted had no further involvement with the family; he was amazed to be told by a journalist in 2012 that Jeff Bezos was his son.
The authorities at Jackie’s high school told her she would have to leave when she became a mother. “I pushed back and I kept on pushing back,” she recalled. Eventually she was allowed to remain, under stringent conditions: “I had to arrive and depart school within five minutes of the starting and finishing bells… I could not talk to other students… I couldn’t eat lunch in the cafeteria… I was told I would not be allowed to walk across the stage with my classmates to get my diploma.” She submitted, and graduated.
Determined to be independent, she secured a job as a secretary and moved into an apartment with Jeff when he was 18 months old; she could not afford a telephone, so her father gave her a walkie-talkie to maintain contact.
She took up night classes at the University of Albuquerque, Jeff accompanying her: “I would show up with an infant and two duffel bags, one full of my text books and the other full of diapers.” In 1968 she married a fellow student, Miguel “Mike” Bezos, who had come to the US as a refugee from Cuba after Castro seized his family’s lumber business. Jeff was told at the age of 10 that he was not Mike’s biological son, but always referred to him as “my real father”.
Jackie and Miguel Bezos at the 2018 Hispanic Society Museum & Library Gala in New York – Gonzalo Marroquin/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
Jackie recalled the young Jeff as both strong-willed and practical: when he was a toddler she refused to give in to demands to replace his cot with a proper bed, until she entered his bedroom one day to find he had dismantled the cot with a screwdriver. The Bezoses went on to have a daughter and a son together, and Jeff invented an alarm that buzzed if his siblings tried to enter his room uninvited.
Jackie Bezos observed that her son received a valuable education through working on her parents’ ranch in Texas during the school holidays. “You become really self-sufficient when you work with the land. One of the things [Jeff] learnt is that there really aren’t any problems without solutions. Obstacles are only obstacles if you think they’re obstacles. Otherwise, they’re opportunities.”
Although she gave up her academic ambitions when she married Mike, Jackie Bezos later resumed her studies, graduating from Saint Elizabeth University in New Jersey aged 40. In 2000 she and her husband established the Bezos Family Foundation, giving hundreds of millions of dollars to cancer charities and educational causes.
Jackie Bezos was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia in 2020 and was unable to accompany her husband to Jeff Bezos’s recent lavish wedding in Venice. Last year Jeff named the barge Jacklyn, used as a landing platform for Blue Origin spacecraft, in her honour.
Jackie Bezos is survived by her husband, daughter and two sons.
Jackie Bezos, born December 29 1946, died August 14 2025
