Jackie Bezos, who gave birth to her son Jeff at 17 and for a time raised him alone as she struggled to build their lives together, has died. She was 78.

Jeff Bezos, the Amazon and Blue Origin founder, said in an Instagram post that his mother died Thursday in Miami after suffering from Lewy body dementia. 

“She pounced on the job of loving me with ferocity, brought my amazing dad onto the team a few years later, and then added my sister and brother to her list of people to love, guard and nourish,” said Bezos.

“She always gave so much more than she ever asked for,” he added.

Born Jacklyn Gise, she was a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Albuquerque, N.M., when she learned she was pregnant. She wed boyfriend Ted Jorgensen, 18, in July 1963, but the marriage of the young parents would last less than two years. 

Gise, with help from child-raising help from her own parents, managed to complete her studies.

By 1968, she was making plans to marry Miguel (Mike) Bezos, a Cuban immigrant she had met while the pair each worked at a local bank. Bezos would later formally adopt his stepson, and the couple moved to Houston, then Miami as his career as a petroleum engineer, including for Exxon, progressed. 

The couple welcomed two more children, son Mark and daughter Christina. 

Jorgensen agreed to Gise’s request to not be involved in his biological son’s life. Jorgensen only learned what became of him when contacted by author Brad Stone for his 2013 book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

“Your son is one of the most successful businessmen on the planet,” Stone said he told a stunned Jorgensen, who had gone on to run an Arizona bicycle shop. Jorgensen died in 2015 at age 70.

Involved in family foundation

According to Stone’s book, Jackie Bezos was concerned about her son’s plan to leave a well-paying New York City job at a hedge fund in the early 1990s to start the online bookseller known as Amazon, after names such as Cadabra, Aard and Relentless were rejected. She even asked him if it was a project that could be pursued on nights and weekends.

Nevertheless, she and her husband Mike were among the earliest group of investors in Amazon, based in Seattle, putting up about $250,000 US in two instalments by 1995. 

One of her first public comments was in 1999, when she spoke to The Associated Press about the formative influence of her own father on her son.

Lawrence Gise was a former Atomic Energy Commission official with expertise in aerospace, and for about a decade, Jeff Bezos would spend summers on his grandfather’s ranch in Cotulla, Texas, about 400 kilometres where the Blue Origin space company has now set up shop. 

“One of the things [Jeff] learned is that there really aren’t any problems without solutions,” she told AP of his time on the ranch. “Obstacles are only obstacles if you think they’re obstacles. Otherwise, they’re opportunities.”

As Amazon evolved from disrupting retail book sales to becoming an e-commerce and cloud-computing giant, among other activities, Jackie and Mike Bezos became heavily involved in the Bezos Family Foundation, which contributed hundreds of millions to Seattle-area hospitals.

Two men in spacesuits are shown seated and smiling.Mark Bezos, left, smiles as he looks at his older brother after both were part of a crew that flew on the Blue Origin New Shepard in Van Horn, Texas, on July 20, 2021. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Jeff Bezos stepped away from the day-to-day running of Amazon in 2021 to devote more focus to Blue Origin’s space exploration, as well as philanthropic efforts, such as the Bezos Earth Fund. 

Bezos is also the owner of the Washington Post, a business endeavour he said hadn’t been among his career ambitions. The newspaper experienced a period of robust growth in revenue and hired hundreds more staff in the first years after his 2013 purchase, but the newspaper has encountered headwinds in the past year, which has been marked by the departures of several high-profile reporters.

The business leader shares four children with his first wife, MacKenzie Scott. He recently married a second time, in Italy, to the former broadcaster Lauren Sanchez. 

“We will miss her SO much,” Sanchez Bezos said of Jackie Bezos, in a reply to his Instagram post on Thursday. 

Lewy body dementia is characterized by the presence of abnormal structures called Lewy bodies in the brain. The symptoms include loss of memory, judgment and reasoning, and changes in mood, behaviour and communication abilities.

Lewy body dementia can occur on its own, or with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. The cause is unknown and there is no cure. Among those diagnosed in the past were Academy Award winner Robin Williams and former NHL player Bob Murdoch.