January 12, 1964
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos turns 58 today, and there are many who believe that the second richest man on earth is going through a midlife crisis.
Lately it seems that his priorities in life have changed: He divorced his wife of 25 years for the sake of presenter Lauren Sanchez, went for a walk in space, started exercising with obvious results and generally seems to enjoy life more, with vacations, trips and frantic parties.
After all this, his great opponent, Elon Musk, recently threw his “nail”: Bezos should spend more time in his space company, Blue Origin and less in the jacuzzi, said the richest man in the world for the No2.
And while the success story of Jeff Bezos, the man who founded one of the world’s largest companies, is more or less well known, there are still some unknown details about his life.
His teenage mother and the “Greek” surname
His mother, Jackie, was just 17 years old and a third-grader when she gave birth to him in 1964. However, her marriage to Jeff Bezos’s biological father, Ted Jorgensen, did not last even two years. The couple divorced when their son was just 17 months old.
In the years that followed, Jackie struggled to make ends meet as she worked as a secretary, earning $ 190 a month. She did not even have a telephone in her apartment, but a walkie-talkie to which her father called her every afternoon at 7 to make sure she was OK.
Determined to make a better life for her son, she enrolled in college and attended night classes. She was forced, however, to choose only the lessons of the teachers who allowed her to bring the baby with her. There she met her future husband, Mike Bezos, an immigrant from Cuba. They married four years later, with Bezos adopting Jeff, giving him his last name and missing father figure.
So, some publications in Greece may have insisted for years that the man who has won even the title of richest in the world has some Greek origin, but the reality is that Bezos, in his own case, is a Cuban name.
His biological father and the circus
Bezos’s biological father was born in Chicago. By the time Ted Jorgensen met Jackie, he was 18 years old and a rising circus star, where he did single-track numbers.
“I was not a good father or a good husband,” he would admit years later. After his separation from Jackie, he had her phone, but he did not want to get involved in her life. Therefore, he never sought all these years to communicate with her or with his son, whom he had seen since he wore diapers.
He was the son of a 17-year-old high school student and the owner of a bike shop. He had a different name then, too:
Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen.
The marriage between Jacklyn Gise and Ted Jorgensen didn’t last long — a year, at most. pic.twitter.com/ItnCbYmqYk
— Mario Gabriele ???? (@mariogabriele) July 30, 2020
Thus, decades passed without him realizing that the son he had left behind was meanwhile one of the richest people on earth. When Brad Stone, author of the biography “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon”, looked for him for an interview, he was shocked to find that Jorgensen did not know that the businessman-phenomenon that the newspapers were writing about was his son.
“I did not know where he was, whether he had a good job or not, even if he was alive or not,” he admitted.
Jorgensen, meanwhile, had moved to Arizona, where he opened a bicycle shop. He had married his second wife, Lisa, and was living with his four sons from her previous marriage.
Although he expressed a desire to see his only biological son, Jeff Bezos was not interested in such a thing. It is said, however, that the businessman sent him a letter. Ted Jorgensen died in 2015, at the age of 71, without having met his billionaire son.
Money Review
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