Jackie Bezos, mother of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has died at the age of 78. A fierce supporter of her son’s e-commerce venture and a philanthropist with a big heart, she passed away at her Miami home on August 14, after a long battle with “Lewy body dementia”, according to the Bezos Family Foundation website. Besides investing a sizeable sum on her son’s nascent business venture when it was still a tiny startup, Jackie’s net worth goes beyond commercial undertakings, and her story is one of resilience, and compassion.
The Amazon investment
In 1995, Jackie Bezos and her husband Miguel “Mike” Bezos made the decision to back Jeff’s budding e-commerce startup by investing a whopping $245,573, despite warnings from the Amazon finder about the potential failure of his venture. Jackie Bezos bought 847,716 shares in July 1995, following her husband who had purchased 582,528 shares five months earlier.
This contribution, which was a high-stakes gamble, yielded historically extraordinary returns after Amazon’s success, roughly estimated at 12,000,000 percent, elevating their stake to nearly $30 billion at its peak, as of 2018. Keeping aside lumpsum donations and stock sales, analyses indicate that the couple controls an estimate of $10 billion in Amazon shares, making them one of the company’s biggest individual shareholders.
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Bezos Family Foundation
Decades before Jeff Bezos’ company had launched any philanthropic endeavors, Jackie and her husband started the Bezos Family Foundation in 2000. The charity foundation dedicates profits from the e-commerce giant to fund education initiatives including Vroom and scholarship programs like the Bezos Scholars Program. The Bezos Family Foundation website highlights Jackie’s vision for the charity: “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 foundation has supported hundreds of other organizations, especially focusing on causes backing children and young adults. Their largest single donation was to Aspen Institute in August 2024, when they granted $185.7 million in order to fund a new youth-focused center. In 2022, a staggering $710 million gift was made to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Centre.
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Trust funds
In addition to philanthropic initiatives, the Bezos family manages Amazon stocks through four trust funds – the Jacklyn Gise Bezos 1996 Revocable Trust holding 8.9 million shares, the Miguel A. Bezos 1996 Revocable Trust with 4.8 million, the Bezos Family Trust with 2.9 million, and finally the Bezos Generation Skipping Trust holding 675,000 shares.
