Tragic Details About Jeff Bezos

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Jeff Bezos had the typical entrepreneurial experience in reverse. While speaking to TIME in 1999, Bezos shared that when he opened his first business, an online bookstore, in 1994, he believed he only had a 30% chance of success. However, the heavy gamble paid off as the little bookstore became the E-tail giant that is Amazon. As the company grew, so did Bezos' horizons, and he tried his hand at several ventures that cost him dearly. In 2014, Amazon's mobile device, the Fire Phone, hit the market with a $199 price tag. Unfortunately, within a couple of months, the price dropped to 99 cents, which also included a 2-year AT&T plan. The estimated loss from this ill-advised venture was an eye-watering $170 million. 

Amazon has similarly faced astounding losses in failed investments over the years. In 1999, the E-tailer lost tens of millions with its investment in Pets.com, which went belly up in 2001. Just a year prior, the tech giant poured $60 million into a delivery business called Kozmo, which was defunct by 2001. During an appearance at Business Insider's 2014 Ignition conference, Bezos also revealed that Amazon had racked up billions of dollars in other losses. However, according to the 2020 book "Invent and Wander," he believed there were two types of failures: Experimental and operational. 

The Blue Origin founder argued that operational failures were a greater cause for concern because they showed poor execution. In contrast, Bezos reckoned entrepreneurs shouldn't be bummed out about experimental failures because they had tried something brand new in a valiant attempt to change the game for good. Suffice it to say he has taken a similarly optimistic approach to all the tragedies he's endured.

Jeff Bezos was born with a totally different name to Ted Jorgensen and his then-wife, Jacklyn Bezos: Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen. According to the 2013 biography "The Everything Store," Jeff's parents struggled to make ends meet with Ted working a $1-an-hour job at a department store while also being part of a unicyclist troupe. Ted was reportedly a heavy drinker and partier who wasn't a strong presence in his son's life from the get-go. "I wasn't a good father or husband," Ted admitted to "The Everything Store" author Brad Stone. "It was really all my fault." Ted and Jackelyn eventually parted ways in 1965, and she relocated to her parents' home with then-17-month-old Jeff. 

Ted supposedly stopped visiting his son when he was around three and struggled to keep up with child support payments too. At one point, Ted was unsure if his son was even alive. So, he was naturally shocked when Stone informed him of the tech billionaire's impressive life achievements. During a 2014 chat with Inside Edition, Ted acknowledged that he desperately wanted to apologize to Jeff in person before passing away from emphysema. 

Ted also provided a message for his son: "I would just like to tell him I used to change his diapers and just shake his hand and tell him he's really done a good job with his life." However, it doesn't seem like the reunion happened before Ted's passing in 2015. As for Jeff, he claimed that he didn't think much of his father, save for the odd moment where he had to fill out his name on medical forms.

In August 2025, Jeff Bezos took to Instagram to sadly announce that his mother, Jacklyn Bezos, had passed away at the age of 78 after "a long fight with Lewy Body Dementia." In his heartfelt tribute, the Blue Origin founder admired his mother's strength in raising him when she was still just a kid herself. Jeff similarly opened up about the tragic story of his mom, Jackie Bezos, and how he didn't come from money in a 2018 interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner. "I can assure you that being a pregnant teenager in high school was not cool in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at that time," he pointed out, per Business Insider. "And so it was very difficult for her." In his Instagram tribute, the tech billionaire wrote that Jackie's journey as a young mother "couldn't have been easy, but she made it all work," further noting that she "pounced on the job of loving [him] with ferocity." 

Jackie notably felt the warmth of both her children and grandchildren as she breathed her last. The mother-son duo evidently had an inseparable bond. In a 2022 Mother's Day post on X, formerly known as Twitter, the Amazon founder expressed awe at everything she had accomplished, adding, "You kept us both safe inside your heart." According to Bloomberg, Jeff's stepfather, Miguel Bezos, and Jackie both believed in their son's idea for Amazon from the very start and even invested about $250,000 into the company themselves in 1995, disregarding the founder's caution that he might not ever be able to return it. However, their risk obviously paid off since the couple's shares were around $30 billion in 2018.

Jeff Bezos once had a scary helicopter crash experience. In the Washington Post reporter Christian Davenport's 2018 book "The Space Barons," he wrote that the tech billionaire had his eyes set on space in March 2003 and was on the hunt for a desert ranch where he could perform crucial tests to finally make his dreams a reality. While scouting around West Texas in search of his ideal location, locals informed Bezos that he was better off exploring the desert by land over a couple of days instead of taking a helicopter ride. 

However, Bezos' packed schedule didn't allow him to devote days to the task, so he decided to take the helicopter. At some point, a strong wind veered the craft off its course and into a tree line, which eventually caused it to crash into a mound of dirt. Most of the five people on board only had minor injuries, save for his lawyer, Elizabeth Korrell, who suffered a broken vertebrae. According to Davenport, when the Amazon founder confirmed the status of his fellow passengers, he let out a loud laugh that echoed across the canyon. 

As Bezos confessed to Fortune in 2008, he did not have any epiphanies or reflections in the moments before the helicopter crash, except for: "What a dumb way to die." However, when the tech billionaire spoke to Fast Company in 2004, he shared a word of advice: "Avoid helicopters whenever possible. They're not as reliable as fixed-wing aircraft." Given all this, it's surprising that Bezos eventually married Lauren Sanchez, whose expansive career includes being a qualified helicopter pilot.

The controversial way Jeff Bezos kickstarted his romance with Lauren Sánchez Bezos was allegedly revealed by his brother-in-law, Michael Sánchez. On January 9, 2019, the same day the Amazon founder announced the end of his 25-year marriage to his first wife, Mackenzie Scott, the National Enquirer published a shocking report claiming that Bezos had been enjoying a months-long affair with Lauren. The tabloid's article even featured saucy texts that the Blue Origin founder had sent to the former Fox News anchor when they were both still married to other people. 

The National Enquirer included descriptions of NSFW photos that Jeff had supposedly sent while they were having an affair. Later in the month, his personal security consultant, Gavin de Becker, disclosed to the Daily Beast that they had a sneaking suspicion Michael was responsible for the text message leaks. However, Michael clarified to the Washington Post that he hadn't tipped the tabloid off about his sister's alleged indiscretions. Strangely, in a February 2019 Vanity Fair interview, Michael didn't exactly take the same stance, admitting, "I'm not saying I didn't do something." 

But he still insisted that all of his actions were only to "protect" his sister's romance. Things seemed bleak for Michael in February 2020 as the National Enquirer's parent company, American Media, shared a statement with Variety to confirm that he was their "sole source" for the exposé on Jeff and Lauren's affair. Additional reports alleged that Michael had received $200,000 for the 2018 contract through which he became their informant. Unsurprisingly, Lauren developed an estranged relationship with her brother as a result, and he was axed from the Bezoses' wedding.

Jeff Bezos notably has several impressive academic achievements under his belt. In addition to being a National Merit Scholar and graduating at the top of his high school class, Bezos also joined the University of Florida's Student Science Training Program. His ambitions were clear in his high school valedictorian speech, as the future billionaire proudly informed his classmates that he wanted to usher humanity into a new reality where they could inhabit a new planet. To make his interstellar dreams a reality, Bezos enrolled in Princeton University to study physics and eventually become a theoretical physicist. 

However, in a 2001 interview with The Guardian, the brainiac confessed that he still struggled when he started studying quantum mechanics. "I was doing well, but it was so much work for me, it was hard — and there were half a dozen people in my class who were so gifted, and their brains were just wired in a different way, and the things that I worked so hard to do came so effortlessly to them," Bezos acknowledged. The Amazon founder also opened up about his feelings from the time when he spoke at the Economic Club of Washington in 2018. 

Bezos recalled how he had to solve a difficult partial differential equation for homework. After hours of struggling to find the solution, he and his roommate approached their classmate, Yasantha Rajakarunanayake, and he solved it in a jiffy because he had previously tackled a similar problem. At that moment, Bezos realized he simply wasn't cut out to be a theoretical physicist and ultimately changed his major to computer science and electrical engineering instead.